Tour
Scotland on a unique small
group tour of Scotland
George Bennie (1892-1957) George Bennie was born in 1892 at Auldhouse, Glasgow, the son of an engineer, but spent much of his younger life at Rothesay. Though he had a Glasgow address in the 1930s, he maintained his home at Normanhurst, Bute. He patented a number of inventions, one of the first being a stable ashtray which could be used at sea. Soon he turned his inventive talents towards the sphere of public transportation and developed an idea for a monorail type system - the 'Railplane'. This was designed to achieve far greater speeds than existing railway stock, without the inherent risks which ocurred when using the existing type of track and locomotive. The design for the Railplane vehicle and carriages drew heavily on the design technology of the aircraft industry and they were built by Beardmore Engineering Co., Inchinnan, who had been involved in building airships, amongst many other products. The track was supported by a structure of girders which could straddle an existing railway track, allowing goods trains to pass below. In an LNER siding at Burnbrae, near Milngavie on the periphery of Glasgow a test line was constructed. The
official launch of Railplane in 1930 was greeted with much enthusiasm
and acclaim, despite the length of the track being insufficient
for the vehicle to reach the optimum 150 miles per hour (only
50 miles per hour was achieved). Unfortunately this was not translated
into the necessary financial backing that Bennie needed to further
the project. The proposed line from Edinburgh to Glasgow was not
built, nor was the one between Southport and Blackpool. By 1937,
Bennie was bankrupt. He had financed most of the work himself.
The test line remained a feature on the Glasgow landscape until
a year before Bennie's death, when it was demolished for scrap. |
Visit
Dunkeld Send
an email if you |