Watch This YouTuber Turn A Car Into A Train

Trains. They’re a bit like cars, but they’re really long, and run on rails. Given that the similarities begin and end with them being vehicles with wheels, the worlds of cars and trains rarely cross over, unless you’re taking the Eurotunnel to France.

That hasn’t stopped motorbike YouTuber Matt Spears from combining them, though. His journey begins with sourcing a Spira, an obscure if surprisingly rapid electric three-wheeled microcar that seems like something of an engineering dead end. It’s built with a strong focus on safety, and as such has a front end made entirely of foam. This also allows it to float, as Matt demonstrates in a previous video.

The end goal, though, is to turn the Spira into something that can run along train tracks. Why? Well, why not? The job starts with building a front axle from some aluminium and “a bunch of go kart parts” from Amazon, onto which some train-style wheels can be mounted.

Next, Matt fabricates some extended suspension mounts to make the rear track wide enough to roll along a railway, as well as fitting some extra guide wheels to the rear.

Spira ‘railroad car’ crosses a bridge

And that’s about it – Matt takes the Spira out to an abandoned railway track to give this ridiculous homebuilt creation its first test run. Things go smoothly right up until the moment that they don’t, leading to an off-camera mishap. As a result, Matt elects to add some flanges (stop giggling at the back) to the wheels to make everything a bit more train-like, as well as lengthening and further bracing the chassis.

We’ll leave you to watch the final result for yourself, but safe to say, if the British government’s still undecided on what rolling stock to use on what’s left of the High Speed 2 project, we have a suggestion.