Maglev
The world's first commercial maglev system was a low-speed maglev shuttle that ran between the airport terminal of Birmingham International Airport and the nearby Birmingham International railway station between 1984 and 1995. Its track length was , and trains levitated at an altitude of , levitated by electromagnets, and propelled with linear induction motors. It operated for 11 years and was initially very popular with passengers, but obsolescence problems with the electronic systems made it progressively unreliable as years passed, leading to its closure in 1995. One of the original cars is now on display at Railworld in Peterborough, together with the RTV31 hover train vehicle. Another is on display at the National Railway Museum in York.
Tracked Hovercraft
Laithwaite was as publicly critical of the government's cancellation as he had been of BR's earlier efforts on LIM research. However, by this time he had distanced himself from the hovercraft arrangement, concluding that the maglev was a better solution. Laithwaite had found that careful arrangement of the LIM allowed a single motor to act as both the lift and traction system, a system he called "traverse-flux", or "river of magnetism". Having continued his research at Derby throughout, when it became clear that Tracked Hovercraft was truly dead, Laithwaite started pushing for the test track to be converted to a testbed for his maglev design. By that point Rohr, Inc. in the US were already experimenting with their own LIM arrangement of this sort on their ROMAG personal rapid transport system, and there were several German maglev efforts underway as well. In the end the TH test track was abandoned. Laithwaite's work would eventually be used as the basis for the Birmingham Maglev, the first operational maglev system.