Tilting Tragedy - The Advanced Passenger Train

Hello all! :D

In perhaps the greatest tragedy in British railway history, the Advanced Passenger Train or APT was an experimental tilting train which was unbearably close to becoming a success, and could have easily paved the way not only for the improvement of high speed services within the UK, but could have been the barnstormer for a range of export models with the potential of revolutionising train travel across the world.

Instead, poor management, a condemning national press, and a disinterested government, conspired to destroy the APT as it edged oh so very close to being mechanically perfect, and with a little bit more funding and commitment could have attained the goal originally proposed by British Rail back in the 1960s, but with its fate decided by far greater powers, what was meant to be the pioneering new face of railway technology instead became an embarrassment to both BR and the prestige of UK technology as a whole, with future rail operators in Britain ending up buying back a system of train travel that this country had come within inches of securing.

Much of the revised information in this reworked video I would like to owe to Kit Spackman, who was the engineer behind the original tilting mechanism for the APT-E and was heavily involved in the train's development between the late 1960s and mid-1970s. I had the pleasure of attending a lecture he was presenting on the APT-E's development which was fascinating to listen to and he was a very friendly man to chat to after the lecture.

All video content and images in this production have been provided with permission wherever possible. While I endeavour to ensure that all accreditations properly name the original creator, some of my sources do not list them as they are usually provided by other, unrelated YouTubers. Therefore, if I have mistakenly put the accreditation of 'Unknown', and you are aware of the original creator, please send me a personal message at my Gmail (this is more effective than comments as I am often unable to read all of them): [email protected]

The views and opinions expressed in this video are my personal appraisal and are not the views and opinions of any of these individuals or bodies who have kindly supplied me with footage and images.

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References:
- APT-P.com
- Rail Revisited (and their respective sources)
- Wikipedia (and its respective references)