Soviet engineers in the 1970s strapped two massive turbojet engines from a Yak-40 passenger plane to the roof of a standard commuter train just to see how fast it could go.

A closer look

Soviet engineers in the 1970s strapped two massive turbojet engines from a Yak-40 passenger plane to the roof of a standard commuter train just to see how fast it could go. Reaching speeds of 160 miles per hour, the SVL (High-Speed Laboratory Car) was an absolute triumph of questionable Cold War decision-making and brute-force physics. Instead of upgrading their notoriously terrible rail infrastructure, the USSR figured strapping literal jet engines to public transit was a much more reasonable solution to cut down travel times. Sadly, the jet-train consumed enough fuel to bankrupt a small nation and made an ear-bleeding amount of noise, ultimately leading it to be abandoned and left to rust in a train graveyard. It stands today as a beautiful, terrifying monument to that brief moment in history when engineers were allowed to treat real-world transportation logistics like an unhinged game of Kerbal Space Program