[Lee Stewart]

On 23 July 1966, Don Wetzel – an ex-military pilot – put the machine to the test on a flat, straight stretch of railway between Butler, Indiana, and Stryker, Ohio. The results spoke for themselves: the Black Beetle reached a speed of 296 km/h (183 mph). Interviewed by GE Reports in February 2014, the then 82-year-old Don revealed that the train had gone even faster and was actually slowing down when it was timed: “On my second run our speed reached 196 mph [315 km/h] and we were decelerating when we went through the timing traps… Everybody thought that it was quite funny that we set a world record while decelerating.”

With the record in the bag, the boosters were removed from this unique vehicle and re-employed on snow blowers. The Black Beetle never went into production and remained an experimental one-off. But that day in 1966 proved conclusively that high-speed rail travel was possible using existing technology.