In a factory yard north of Moscow, among the scrapyard of rusted and decrepit machines of Soviet times, a piece of Cold War history sits frozen in time. Its nose juts upward, sleek as a fighter jet. Twin aircraft engines crown its roof like wings clipped before takeoff. This wacky Frankestein train is known as the Soviet turbojet train — a machine designed to blaze across continents decades before today’s bullet trains.
Although it never made it far beyond the testing phase, for a brief moment in the 1970s, it dared to redefine how fast humanity could move on rails. The Speedy Wagon Laboratory, as it was officially designated by its Soviet engineers, was a product of its time—bold, innovative, and ultimately, impractical. Decades later, its rusting remains stand as a monument to a futuristic vision that never left the station.
Jet Engines on Rails
In the late 1960s, as the Cold War rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union reached its peak. The Americans and Soviets were competing for everything. The race for supremacy extended beyond space and nuclear arms—it barreled down the railroad tracks. Engineers on both sides dreamed of a train so fast it could rival airplanes. The obvious solution was to marry airplanes with trains — just strap jet engines to a railcar and let it rip.
The Soviet project was inspired by the U.S.’s own experiment, the M-497 Black Beetle, a jet-powered train that hit 296 km/h (184 mph) in 1966.
“My wife is a commercial artist and she did the streamlining design,” said Don Wetzel, the American engineer behind the Black Beetle. “The original design had the jet engines on the rear end of the car, but we changed it to the forward end. She said that the car looked a lot better with the engines on the front.”
Not to be outdone, Soviet engineers retrofitted an ER22 electric train carriage with two AI-25 turbojet engines, borrowed from the Yak-40 passenger plane. The Speedy Wagon Laboratory was born.
To slice through the air, the train was fitted with a streamlined nose and tail cone. Its brakes were reinforced to handle the engines’ thrust. After wind tunnel tests with 15 scale models, the Speedy Wagon Laboratory debuted in 1970, reportedly hitting speeds up to 260 km/h (160 mph)—faster than Japan’s early bullet trains. For the Soviet Union, still basking in the glow of Yuri Gagarin’s historic spaceflight, this train was another bold stroke — a declaration of intent.
But speed came at a cost.
The jet engines guzzled fuel, making the train wildly expensive to operate. Stability was very poor; at high speeds, even small rail imperfections could spell disaster. In a nation like the Soviet Union, where maintenance was never a strong suit, this could have spelled disaster. And then there was the noise. “The roaring jets were unbearable for people living near the tracks,” one account noted.
A Dream Derailed
For five years, the Soviet Union tinkered with the jet train, even testing it on public rails. But the project collided with reality. The rail system itself wasn’t built for such speeds—gravel tracks would need concrete reinforcement to survive the jet blast. Meanwhile, the Soviet economy was straining, and priorities shifted.
By the 1980s, the Speedy Wagon Laboratory was mothballed in a St. Petersburg rail yard, left to rust. Its American counterpart, the Black Beetle, met a similar fate—though it still holds the record for the fastest jet-powered train in North America.
Yet, the Soviet experiment wasn’t a total loss. The data collected helped shape future high-speed rail projects, including Russia’s Troika trains. And in 2008, the train’s front section was salvaged, painted, and mounted on a plinth outside the Tver Carriage Works—a memorial to an idea that was ahead of its time.
Today, as bullet trains crisscross Asia and Europe, the Speedy Wagon Laboratory serves as a reminder: innovation sometimes outpaces practicality. But without these wild experiments, the trains of tomorrow might never leave the drawing board.
