Now that’s a suspended rail service!
QUESTION Further to the earlier answer about the Schienenzeppelin, wasn’t there a British propeller-driven railcar? This was the Bennie Railplane, such a strange scheme it was a wonder it ever got off the ground.
George Bennie’s 1920s concept, a cigarshaped carriage with aircraft propellers fore and aft, was supposed to run suspended from a complicated gantry above existing railway lines.
The lower track was intended to carry heavy goods, while rail planes sped passengers and mail at 300mph.
Bennie was a stubborn, eccentric, scottish inventor with, apparently, little formal technical background. he paid for a demonstration line at Milngavie, near Glasgow, which opened in July 1930.
The machine never reached anything like the predicted speeds and World War ii put paid to Bennie’s dreams. Older people can possibly remember the structures lasting until well after the war.
There were two flaws with Bennie’s concept. First, if you have contact with a road or rails, why not power the wheels instead of blowing air around? it’s easier, as thousands of vehicle designs prove.
Even on water, trying to move a car ferry by noisily blowing the air (like the giant hovercraft that ran for a while from Ramsgate, for instance) did not work as well as simply pushing the water.
The scheme’s second flaw (this also applies to monorails, maglevs etc) is the lack of interoperability with the network: you cannot run a train in or out of such a line; junctions are almost impossible. They can be used for short self-contained lines like airport shuttles but that’s about it.
Even the conversion of rail lines to guided bus lanes in some British towns has often proved disastrous. it looks as if the authorities in hertfordshire, for example, have looked at the fiascos elsewhere and dropped this idea for the st Albans Abbey branch from Watford.
Benedict le Vay, author: Britain From The Rails: A Window Gazer’s Guide, London SW19.
QUESTION The Panama hat and the Hundred Years War are notable for having been misnamed. What other events or items have been given the wrong name? FURTHER to earlier answers, the world of zoology has countless examples of animals that have been incorrectly named.
Despite its name, the electric eel ( Electrophorus electricus), from south America, is not an eel but a knifefish belonging to the order Gymnotiformes. The Barbary ‘apes’ ( Macaca sylvanus) of Gibraltar are not apes, but macaques, a kind of monkey. They are so named possibly because they lack a tail, which makes them apelike in appearance.
With a name like Macaw, you would be forgiven for thinking these brightly coloured parrots originate from China’s Macau region but they are natives of Central and south America.
The Barbary sheep ( Ammotragus lervia) is a kind of wild goat-antelope (caprid) and if you ask for Bombay duck in a restaurant you will be presented with a dish on which will be a species of lizardfish of the family synodontidae. Russell Tofts, zoologist, author and zoo
historian, Whittlesford, Cambs.
QUESTION Are any of Jupiter’s moons potentially habitable? OF JUPITER’s 63 moons, 46 are less than two miles wide and were probably asteroids before Jupiter’s gravity snared them.
The four biggest are comparable in size to our Moon. They are io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
The habitability of planets is mostly determined by stellar illumination but Jupiter’s moons receive reflected stellar light and thermal emission from their planet. Jupiter is contracting by about 2cm a year and converts gravitational energy into heat, radiating more light than it gets from the sun.
Another key factor is water; considered a prerequisite for extraterrestrial life. This narrows the search to Jupiter’s ice moon Europa. Last month, researchers from nasa and the California institute of Technology provided evidence that salty water from the huge ocean 60 miles beneath Europa’s frozen surface rises up — evidence of a chemical exchange between ocean and surface, making the ocean a richer chemical environment.
Life could therefore exist there, perhaps subsisting in an environment similar to Earth’s deep-ocean hydrothermal vents.
human colonisation of Europa would present severe difficulties. Europa receives enough radiation per day to kill someone within two days, so colonists would have to live under the ice sheet to shield themselves, something they would be compelled to do anyway, as the surface temperature is minus 170c.
Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge.