Gareth Dennis
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A rough history of tilting trains
🕑 Added 2025-09-05 00:17:30 +0000 UTCTrying a new thing - here's a very early draft of a humorous history of tilting trains and their relationship to APT... This will become a blog post somewhere eventually, but for now you can have the rough version to read! Patreon exclusive!
For anyone curious of the Avelio Liberty tilt lineage and thinking its link to APT may be anachronistic, it isn't.
FIAT were developing their tilting prototypes a little ahead of British Rail, with their ETRY0160 pre-prototype first running in 1969 (nice) with the name Pendolino, whereas British Rail first ran the pre-prototype APT-E in 1972. FIAT got a prototype ETR401 into public service in 1976 (we got our prototype APT-P into service in 1981).
However, FIAT could not get their system to work reliably and had a series of fundamental issues with the design. With UK Treasury having given up on APT just as it first entered trial service, BR were forced to sell the patents of the APT active tilt system to FIAT in 1982 to make a quick bob. FIAT then merged the designs and introduced the first generation squadron ETR450 in 1988.
The second generation squadron Pendolino was introduced as the ETR460 in 1993 with various improvements as well as a reduction in tilt angle to 8deg. In 1995, FIAT acquired the rail vehicle bits of Swiss company SIG and proceeded to incorporate SIG electro-mechanical actuators into its updated design of tilt system. This design would form the basis of its bid for the Class 390 fleet for Virgin Trains et al, which they won in 1999 just prior to Alstom gobbling it up in 2000. By this point the tilt system was quite significantly different to the ETR450 origins, using a circular roller beam for the bolster instead of the previous swing links. Including its train- and track-mounted control systems, this technology was called Tiltronix™.
Swing links were still being used in the X2-derived tilting trains developed in Sweden along a similar timeline. This project was initiated in the late 1960s as a joint venture between Kalmar Verkstad, the Swedish State Railways and ASEA, and culminated in the X2000 was ordered in 1986. ABB formed from a merger between ASEA and Swiss company Brown, Boveri & Cie in 1988. In 1989 ABB ate British Rail Engineering Limited (the already privatised train building arm of British Rail that had been responsible for the APT), then gobbled up Kalmar Verkstad in 1990 as the X2000s started entering service. One of these found its way onto the Northeast Corridor over winter 1992/1993. Meanwhile, ABB's train manufacturing arm merged with Daimler-Benz's train building unit to form Adtranz in 1996, and then Bombardier bought that in 2001.*
Bear with me, but we've one last jump back in history to do, and we have to go to Canada (sorry). In the mid-1960s, Alcan had started development of a lightweight aluminium train that would incorporate active tilt. Steelmaking company Dofasco led on the design of the tilting bogies, incorporating control systems developed by SPAR Aerospace (who would later design the Canadarm). Though there were conversations with the British Rail engineers working on the APT, this tilting system was a separate design. This train was the LRC, and the pre-prototype started testing in 1974. A year later, Bombardier purchased Montreal Locomotive Works who were delivering the traction system (because obviously this was a diesel train). The first public services were a trial not in Canada, but by Amtrak on the Northeast Corridor between 1980-1982 as part of early high speed investigations. They also finally entered Canadian service in 1981. Bombardier, by the way, had really screwed up the otherwise extremely good design of the LRC, with their prime mover getting heavier and heavier through development.
In service, the small fleet had initial reliability trouble but it was very fuel efficient as well as being far faster than anything else being run by newly-formed Via Rail. However, no sales were forthcoming and despite good service the locomotives were retired through the 1990s (the cars are still running). As this was happening, Amtrak finally launched its tender for tilting trains to run on the Northeast Corridor. ABB bid an X2000 derivative, and Bombardier paired up with GEC Alsthom (as Alstom was then) to compete with them, using a derivative of the LRC design including its tilt system. Siemens tried too, with a chunked-up version of the ICE3. Bombardier-GEC Alsthom were announced as winners in 1996, as you all know, and the first Acela Express trains were in revenue service in 2000 using an electric power car rather than a diesel locomotive.
In 1986, Bombardier had bought out Belgian train builder BN Constructions Ferroviaires et Métalliques. In 1986/1987 it nabbed the assets of the mostly-murdered Budd and Pullman companies, and in 1989 it ate French train builder ANF Industrie. In 1998, this clump of corporate flesh bid for the first of Virgin Trains' West Coast Main Line orders for both non-tilting and tilting trains, and deployed a steel-bodied derivative of the LRC including its tilting system for the Class 221 Super Voyagers.
Where am I going with this? Well, by 2001 Alstom owned the APT/FIAT-derived Tiltronix™ tilting system and Bombardier owned both the LRC and X2000 tilting systems. In 2016, Alstom won the bid to deliver the Acela replacements - the Avelia Liberty trains would deploy Tiltronix™ (still built in the former FIAT plant in Italy) for their active tilt system. Because capitalism, Alstom gobbled up Bombardier (technically a merger) in 2020, but given the Tiltronix™ system is the tilt technology currently forming Alstom's flagship high speed train product, I suspect the LRC-derived system might die off (the X2000-derived system was never really developed further and is pricier than its competitors), meaning APT wins out in the end.
To complete the picture internationally: the ICE-T is FIAT/APT-derived, the SBB RABDe 500 uses a FIAT/SIG combined design, the DB 611/RegioSwinger use their own tilt systems but now gobbled up via Adtranz into Bombardier then Alstom, Japan has a dump-tonne of its own home-grown tilting systems, South Korea developed its own design but gave up and just straightened out its curves.
So yes, thanks British Rail, without whom the US would have to have used Canadian tilting tech (booooo).
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Interesting, thanks. Here in Australia, we adopted the Hitachi tilting systems for both the diesel and electric Tilt Trains that run on the winding Queensland North Coast line between Brisbane and Cairns and Brisbane and Rockhampton respectively. Also, the X2000 was brought here to run demos for a few months in the 1990s on the Sydney-Canberra line.
