In recent days, retrofuturism-focused forums have been sharing the image of an abandoned train with a very particular feature: two jet engines installed on its roof. This is the SVL prototype—short for “Skorostnoy Vagon Laboratoriya”—which ran on Soviet tracks in the early ’70s, reaching a respectable 250 kilometers per hour.
A Cold War Rivalry on Rails
Anyone who decides to search for the strangest vehicles will probably find hundreds of different designs, and many of them were born as one more extension of the Cold War. Americans and Soviets weren’t only aiming missiles at each other; they also wanted to outdo one another in almost every field. If we focus on the decade of the 1960s, the Space Race was without a doubt the dominant expression of this struggle between superpowers, but there were other things too. In 1966, the New York Central Railroad corporation decided to place two General Electric J47 engines to shape the M-497 Black Beetle, a vehicle that still holds the speed record on tracks in the United States (295.6 kilometers per hour). However, the Black Beetle wasn’t alone. Across the pond, France was exploring a similar concept with its “Aérotrain,” and four years later, the first Soviet attempt arrived: the SVL, or “Skorostnoy Vagon Laboratoriya.”
See the SVL in Action
https://www.youtube.com/embed/LC7FmDgCVew https://www.youtube.com/embed/T66Hkoj02A4A Brief, Fast Experiment
What we can see both in the videos and in the images is the main car of an ER22 electric train with two Ivchenko AI-25 engines from a Yakovlev Yak-40 (which uses three engines) installed on top. Its total mass exceeded 54 tons, of which 7.4 corresponded to its fuel, and it was 92 feet long—about 28 meters. One of the reasons for creating this train was based on reusing engines that had exhausted their useful life in airplanes, while another was the formation of a high-speed service we can only identify as “Russian Troika Express”.
The maximum speed recorded by the SVL was 250 kilometers per hour, a bit below the mark achieved by the Black Beetle, but no less impressive. The SVL project was apparently finished in 1975, and the latest images circulating on the Web were taken in 2014, where it can be seen in a deplorable state. A monument with a replica of the SVL was installed in the city of Tver, as a reminder of that brief but excellent adventure that trains and jet engines had.
