World's first space railway leaves station

Astronauts sent the international space station’s new railcar down a short stretch of track today in the inaugural run of the first permanent railway in orbit.

‘‘We should start moving here,’’ space station resident Carl Walz called out as he sent the computer commands that got the railcar rolling.

The empty car crept along at less than two-tenths of an inch per second, then sped up to four-tenths of an inch per second as it travelled just over 17 feet and then stopped, on cue, at a designated work station.

The car was latching into place when a software message indicated a problem and the test was halted temporarily.

The railcar’s top speed is one inch per second, but engineers did not expect to hit that during today’s test run.

Nasa planned to move the railcar back and forth over the course of a few hours along a 30 foot section of the track that runs the full length of the space station’s newly attached 44 foot girder.

The £132m (€215.5m) railcar eventually will be used to transport the space station’s robot arm from one end of the outpost to the other for construction work.