page_title: Advanced Passenger Train
section_title: BR research
hierarchical_section_title: Advanced Passenger Train / Background / BR research
caption_attribution_description: English: GBR rail passengers by year 1830-2016. Image produced by myself in Microsoft Excel, adding new information onto an earlier chart produced by Tompw and correcting a minor typo in the dataset (for 1846). The data comes from: ATOC's 2008 publication Billion Passenger Railway for 1830 to 2001 The UK Office of Rail Regulation (ORR), specifically Passenger journeys by sector - table for 2002-15 and [http://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/23376/passenger-rail-usage-2016-17-q2.pdf Passenger Rail Usage 2016-17 Q2 Statistical Release] for 2015/16 and 2016/17 Q1 &amp; Q2. The plotted data is the sum of the "Total franchised passenger journeys" and "Non franchised" columns. From 1984 onwards, the point plotted at a given year is actually the last three quarters of the year given and the first quarter of the year afterwards. So, the point at "1985" is the year from April 1985 to March 1986.
context_page_description: The Advanced Passenger Train was a tilting high speed train developed by British Rail during the 1970s and early 1980s, for use on the West Coast Main Line. The WCML contained many curves, and the APT pioneered the concept of active tilting to address these, a feature that has since been copied on designs around the world. The experimental APT-E achieved a new British railway speed record on 10 August 1975 when it reached 152.3 miles per hour, only to be bested by the service prototype APT-P at 162.2 miles per hour in December 1979, a record that stood for 23 years.
  Development of the service prototypes dragged on, and by the late 1970s the design had been under construction for a decade and the trains were still not ready for service. The election of Margaret Thatcher brought matters to a head and she alluded to funding cuts for the project. Facing the possibility of cancellation, BR management decided to put the prototypes into service, with the first runs along the London-Glasgow route taking place in December 1981. The result was a media circus when every problem large or small received front-page coverage and the entire project derided as an example of BR's incompetence.
context_section_description: Following nationalisation of the UK's railways in 1948, British Rail faced significant losses in passengers as the car rapidly became more popular through the 1950s and 60s. By 1970, passenger numbers were roughly half what they had been immediately before World War II. In an attempt to maintain some level of profitability, the government commissioned a report that resulted in the abandonment of many lines as part of the 1963 "Beeching Axe". In spite of this significant restructuring, the company was still built on lines that were pre-war, with routings dating into the 1800s. Maintaining the network was a constant problem and derailments became increasingly common.
  In 1962 Dr. Sydney Jones was hired away from the weapons department at R.A.E. Farnborough with the eventual aim of having him take over as BR's research lead from Colin Ingles, who retired in 1964. Looking into the derailment problem, they found that much of the problem could be traced to a problem known as hunting oscillation. This was well known in the railway world, but tended to happen only at high speeds. On the BR network, especially on freight cars with worn wheels, it was being seen at speeds as low as 20 miles per hour (32 km/h). Jones was convinced that hunting oscillation was an effect similar to the problem of aeroelastic flutter encountered in aerodynamics, and decided to hire someone from the aeronautics field to investigate it.
  In October 1962, Alan Wickens was given the position. Wickens was a dynamics expert who had previously worked at Armstrong Whitworth on the Sea Slug missile and then for a period at Canadair in Montreal before returning to the UK and joining the Blue Steel missile project. When the follow-on Blue Steel II was cancelled in favour of the US designed Skybolt, Wickens left A. V. Roe because he "saw the writing on the wall". He answered an ad for BR, and during the interview he replied that he had no knowledge of, and little interest in, railway bogie design. It was later revealed this was the reason he was hired.
  Over the next several years, Wickens' team carried out what is considered to be the most detailed study of the dynamics of steel wheels on rails ever conducted. Starting with incomplete work by F.W. Carter from 1930, the team studied conventional two-axle bogies and quickly discovered that, as Jones had suspected, the problem was dynamic instability. Out of this work came the concept of a critical speed at which point hunting would become a problem. This work was then extended to the unique two-axle bogieless car designs used on the BR freight network, where the problem was further modified by the dynamics of the entire vehicle.
  Wickens concluded that a properly damped suspension system could eliminate the problem, and set about to demonstrate this. By 1964 this work had produced the first High Speed Freight Vehicle, HSFV-1, a bogieless freight car capable of travelling safely at speeds up to 140 mph (225 km/h). The same work suggested there was no practical upper limit to the achievable speeds in terms of dynamics, and that any limitations on maximum performance would be due to other factors like traction or wear on the lines. Eventually a series of six HSFV designs would be tested until 1976, and the last, HSFV-6, entered service that year.
caption: The period after nationalisation was marked with rapidly falling ridership levels.
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