by Deutsche Bundesbahn to increase performance of its existing rail lines to only . This was all taking place even while many of the "more complacent elements" of British Rail were dismissing the need for any form of high-speed rail. Another serious concern was the rapid development and apparent superiority of the competing maglev concept. A study by THL noted that air drag on a canonical 40-long ton 100-passenger hovercraft at with a (considerable) crosswind would absorb . This is not a particularly great amount of power, a commuter STOL aircraft of similar size would likely require two to three times as much power in cruise – the Vickers Viscount carried 75 passengers and equipped with a total of for take-off and operated around in cruise. Of much greater concern was the need to take in air for the hover pads, accelerating it from ambient to vehicle speed before being pumped into the pads. This load, which THL referred to as momentum drag, accounted for a further . The combined was not unheard of, existing freight locomotives of similar power were already in use. However, these weighed 80 tons, much of it for the voltage control and conversion equipment, which would be far too heavy for the lightweight TH. THL's solution was to move the power supplies to the trackside and use them to power individual sections of the track as the vehicle passed, but this was at the great expense of requiring such equipment to be distributed along the line. In general terms, the maglev simply replaced the hover pads with electromagnets. Removing the motors and fans and replacing the pads with magnets reduced vehicle weight by about 15%. This change meant that the relatively low payload fraction of the hovercraft was greatly increased, as much as doubling it. But much more important was that there was no need to ingest and accelerate air to feed into the pads, which eliminated and replaced it by the power needed to operate the magnets, estimated to be as little as . This meant that the Tracked Hovercraft found itself squeezed between the zero-energy lift system of the steel-wheeled APT and the low-energy lift system of the maglev, leaving no role that one of those systems didn't better serve. Cancellation Only a week after McNair-Wilson's comments at the run in February 1973, funding for the Tracked Hovercraft project was cancelled. Heseltine noted