Milngavie vs. The Monorail Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
Note: Scotland is produced and designed to be heard, not read. We encourage you, if you are able, to listen to the audio, which provides insight which is significantly different to how it appears on the page. Transcripts are generated from the original scripts of the episodes. They may be slightly different to the corresponding audio and may contain errors.
Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 53 - Milngavie vs. The Monorail
MICHAEL PARK: It is 1950. When your dad decided one day that you’d go with him to do some business at a garage in Milngavie, just outside Glasgow, you didn’t want to go with him. Who would?
But it’s 1950, and you don’t say no to your dad when he tells you that you’re going to a garage in Milngavie.
You don’t remember anything about the garage, except that it must have been near railway tracks. Because it was there you saw something that stuck with you for the rest of your life. You saw a spaceship. From the future.
Just like the ones in Dan Dare.
Why it was there, nobody told you, but when you asked to go up your dad smiled and followed you up the rickety flight of wooden stairs that led 15 feet up to a platform in the sky, held between giant metal A frames.
Your Dad’s friend, the man who owned the garage, was talking about how it wasn’t in great nick any more. If there was a speck of rust anywhere on the thing you didn’t notice - plus if it had to come and sit in Earth’s atmosphere when it had come all the way from Venus, it wouldn’t be that surprising if it was a wee bit rusty.
The doors open in front of you and you completely fail to notice the giant transformer that powers the thing. You mistake the fading, blistering paint as some kind of Venutian lettering - you can learn it when you get there. Or learn later later that the letters actually once read GBR.The door and its intricate stained glass inlay sighs open in front of you, as if by some alien magic, you fail to notice the propellers at either end of the giant, rusting hulk of a cigar tube which is locked between a track above and a track below.
You’re going to space.
Who cares how it works?
This is Scotland. A podcast about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park.
It is 1930 and you’re standing on the same platform that an awestruck little boy would be on 20 years in the future. You’re surrounded press and dignitaries, all desperate to hear about your invention.
Should you have got a band? Nah, it speaks for itself, surely. The gleaming 50 foot cigar tube with two immaculately carved and varnished propellers at either end. It doesn’t need a band.
Plus you’ve paid British Pathé, the newsreel company to follow you around for last few months but their reels are silent so it probably wouldn’t be worth the expense of hiring a band.
Ahh, yes. Expense. Try not to think about the expense. £150,000 to develop your brainchild and build a prototype. In 2021 money that’s almost five and a half million pounds but it’ll be worth it.
Soon there will be a Bennie Railplane on every major line in the country. You’ll be a millionaire and you’re not thinking in 2021 money. You’ll be Rockefeller rich.
The idea is simple, or at least it is as you explain it to the great and the good of society as you stand in front of your invention, bowler hat in hand. Trains are inefficient. They’re dirty, they’re grimy, they’re expensive to run. They’re loud, they crash, they require a significant amount of work to build new lines - sometimes you even have to punch through mountains to get them where they’re going.
You tell the crowd, among them the heads of several national train companies, how much steam locomotives suck as they all peer in through the windows at the lavish decoration inside the carriage. They’re only half listening.
That’s fine. They only need to be half listening to hear you say this.
What if you could double the speed of a railway for a fraction of the cost?
That pricked some ears up. The George Bennie Railplane System of Transport will revolutionise travel in the same way that the railway did almost 100 years before with no need to buy more land - just build the Railplane track above the existing railway!
Able to run on either electricity or internal combustion, the Railplane is capable of speeds of up to 120 miles per hour!
Hats are starting to come off now. You have everyone’s attention.
Safety? Not a problem. The car is hooked onto the rail above and uses a guide track underneath to ensure it stays locked into its route. With that and the way it utilises propeller propulsion, there’s little to no way that the Railplane could crash!
And comfort? Well, ladies and gentlemen you’re about to be sitting in the comfort the George Bennie railplane. First class carriages can be as plush as you like but a regular carriage can carry up to 50 passengers in varying degrees of comfort.
It’s quiet too. You launch into the rest of your spiel about how the electric motors which power the propellers are whisper silent but you know fine well that you had most of the bigwigs on the hook at ‘fraction of the cost’.
There are pound signs in their eyes because not only is your system cheaper to run, they can charge more than normal trains for the speed and - to be quite frank - the novelty of it.
People love it. You can tell by the looks on their faces as the carriage pulls away from the platform. With only 130 yards of test track they’re not going to be hitting top speed by any stretch of the imagination but as you wave your hat to them, you can see the smiles on their faces.
You can see the excitement, the promise. You can see the future.
You see the elevated tracks above the streets of cities like London, Paris, New York. What would be stopping a railplane connection between London and Paris? You could be there in a matter of hours!
The intercity line between Glasgow and London was a no-brainer. A journey of just over three hours made business trips up and down to the capital almost commutable!
As you stand there, watching your invention glide silently to the end of the track and back, the future looks bright for George Bennie. You’re glad you invited your mum along to see the whole thing in operation.
Yes, they’re interested alright but it is 1930. Less than a year after the Wall Street Crash, the world was dipping into depression and while the railplane was a good idea - nobody was arguing that point - money for exciting projects like that was drying up.
You were going to have to find your own funds.
Good ideas are never given up though, and in 1931 you approach Southern Railway with funds to build a railplane track from Croydon Airport to Holburn in London.
They knock you back, afraid of losing revenue on the existing train service. But why not, they say, put a railplane in between London Bridge and Dartford?
You’re not interested. For you, a pioneer of a new age of travel, it was a route to an airport or nothing.
So it was nothing.
As each year crept by, interest in the railplane dwindled. You take the idea to the Middle East, trying to drum up support for it using the company you set up to promote it at great expense to yourself.
In 1936 the same company will oust you from the board and leave you bankrupt.
But the railplane never dies. In January of 1945 you appear in the Evening News talking about the new transatlantic service from New York to Prestwick Airport.
“What good is Prestwick Airport if you have to spend one-and-a-half to two-and-a-quarter hours in getting to or from Glasgow?”
You are quoted as saying that the new George Bennie Railplane system can hit a top speed of 200mph and do the journey in 15 minutes.
It still takes 45 minutes today.
You predict that modern airports will be built further and further away from population centres and that fast, efficient, affordable transport should be available to make air travel easier.
You’re not wrong, and yet the investment never comes. The world never gets to see a fully operational George Bennie Railplane system of transport.
Sometimes the best ideas just don’t make it.
Across the road from the McDonald’s on Milngavie Road, just round the corner from Bennie Place in a new estate of houses, there’s a blue plaque affixed to the wall of the little bridge that crosses the Craigdhu Burn.
VOICEOVER: “To commemorate George Bennie’s Railplane which was tested here on 8th July 1930, the bullet-shaped carriage with a propellor at each end was reputed to be the forerunner of the modern monorail. It was suspended from a single track on a 420 foot long, purpose-built test track 30ft above the former LNER railway line situated east of this plaque.”
It may be gone now but there really was nothing on earth like this genuine, bona-fide, electrified, one-car monorail and for a while there, it really put Milngavie on the map.
--------
You’ve been listening to Scotland, it was written and produced by me, Michael Park and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
The music for every episode of Scotland is by our very own Lyle Lanley, Mitch Bain, you can check out more of his work at mitchbain.bequiet.media.
Jamie Mowat does amazing illustrations for us which you can see in our episode art. See more and buy prints at tidlin.com.
Scotland is supported by Chris Lingwood, Scott McCubbin and listeners like you on Patreon. You can get loads more from us for as little as two dollars at: patreon.com/scotlandhistorypodcast
You can find out more about the show and read transcripts on our website, scotlandpodcast.net and on twitter, facebook and instagram by searching Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast.
Thanks for listening. Look after each other, wear a mask, we’ll see you next time.