In the early 1970s the Russians followed the American jet train research by sticking two Yak-40 turbo-jet engines to the lead car of an ER22 train. The SVL (high-speed laboratory car) was intended to be used on the Troika Express and during testing is was able to reach speeds of 180mph (250km/hr)..

Like it’s American counterpart it never really went any further than that.. We can only guess, but I suspect that the only more expensive than trying to fly over dirt would be trying to fly over dirt on rails.. Jet fuel costs, noise levels, and probably just the fact that this is plane old silly contributed to the closing of the programs in both countries..

It’s a real shame that when projects like this end there is no budget for storing them for later viewing.

I love weird tech, and it’s really hard to beat the weirdness that the cold war created here and in Russia.. I grew up at the tail end of the cold war that Ronald Reagan, all praise his name, helped bring to an end while I was still in high school.. Anyway, where was I?? Oh, right, jet powered trains.. Really, jet powered trains..

In 1966 New York Central converted a Rail Diesel Car in to a jet powered train by adding a pair of General Electric J47-19 turbojet engines.. Normally these engines sit under the wing tip of a Convair B-36D intercontinental bomber.

To help the train cut through the air better a large nose was added to the train. Apparently it was pretty fast too. It reached 184mph on it’s way to Ohio. Not too bad for a train in the 60s..

The jet trains don’t end here. I found a Russian version made just a few years later.. But more on that in a few days..

I don’t say that very often.. It’s sort of anti everything I try to do.. But it’s time..

I have been a partner at ForTheWeb.Com since it was founded more than 7 years ago.. We started out as a small web design and hosting firm with 4 partners in Northern California and we have done a lot of good work in that time.. The company has grown and evolved in those years.. But somewhere along the line it quit being “fun”.. A couple of years ago we lost our first partner.. Personality conflicts and other issues kept coming up and three of us decided to buy the fourth out..

With that came more change and some growth.. But lately the “job” has stopped being fun.. It became something I dreaded doing and the extra hours spent on it, above my passion for designing jewelry, just left me tired.. And being a bit of a take or leave it kind of guy, I chose to leave it..

It’s always tough to leave something, especially something that isn’t “finished”.. Over the last 20 years I’ve owned or managed 11 businesses.. Some of them successful, some not so much.. ForTheWeb falls in to that vague middle realm.. The company makes money, has great clients, but doesn’t offer much fullfillment other than that..

This is an amicable parting of the ways, and I expect Shannon and Joel to do quite well in the future with ForTheWeb.. But my days of banging out code for food are behind me now.. Well, except for a couple of pet projects that is - you didn’t expect me to quit cold turkey did you??

I put up another old web site this week.. This one features the wonder and joy that is Robotech.. If you don’t know what it is, there’s probably nothing here for you to see, for those of you that know it, you might like a few things I gathered up over there..

I found proof that the hero actually started his career as a pilot by killing an innocent civilian, and my first fanfic, the MinMei one, that actually got me some serious hate mail which I found absolutely hysterical.. But then at the RoboCon (yes I went like any good fanboy) there were some people there that had lost all touch with reality..

The site itself has a few old school tech ideas in it, some of them actualyl still work.. The Java Applet video player may squeel it’s ass off whel it loads so be prepared to grab your volume control, and there are some pretty bad midis playing through the whole site (hey that site hasn’t seen any love for more than 5 years).. But the ‘cool’ thing is the multiple onMouseOver call.. It’s not a big deal now, but this was one of the first sites that I’m aware of to use a single mouse over to control 5 different elements on the screen.. Hey, it was cool back then.. We could tell by how many people stole the code and left the written by tags in there..

Like the VrE Online site, I think it’s sort of cool to look back at a snapshot of what we were doing on the web years ago.. I’m going to use that as the reason to not ‘fix’ anything instead just being too lazy..

Fey

Many years ago I was part of a group that was really bleeding edge for a lot of things.. In ‘94 we spun off a game magazine called VrE Online.. For about 2 and a half years we published reviews on games and hardware on BBS’, electronically on floppy, and eventually on the internet.. It was a lot of fun and we learned a lot about a lot of things, especially game companies pulling advertising when you pan their games..

Since I’m starting this site all over from scratch I’ve decided to pull the archive of VrE Online out of the crate and put it back up, warts and all.. I haven’t bothered to fix anything except for a few show stopping URL issues.. I also put together a quick and ugly page with a complete list of all of the downloadable version I could find.. If you are interested in seeing where we started in the very early days of the web, the last update was in 1996, check it out over here at vreonline.feydakin.com..

I also need to thank a few of the people that really were a huge part in making the magazine happen.. Louis Stice, Andy Hardison, Jeff Godemann and Craig Crowder were there through some pretty hard times and made all of it bearable.. Thanks guys..