problems with the concept, stated that there was no prospect of a system being installed before 1985, and very limited possibilities between then and the end of the century. He stated that further funding, already to the tune of £5 million by this point, made no sense at that time. Work on the LIM would continue to be funded, however, and the Department of Trade and Industry signed a £500,000 contract with Hawker Siddeley to carry on LIM development. Heseltine was accused by Airey Neave and others of earlier misleading the House of Commons when he stated that the government was still considering giving financial support to the hovertrain, when the decision to pull the plug must have already been taken by the cabinet. He called together the Select Committee on Science and Technology to examine the issue, but they were constantly frustrated in their efforts to obtain cabinet meeting reports. One thing that did surface was that Hawker Siddeley and Tracked Hovercraft were in the process of entering a bid for the GO-Urban system in Toronto, Ontario. This was for the LIM technology, which Hawker Siddeley was proposing to combine with their rubber-tired Hawker Siddeley Minitram system. The GO-Urban contest was eventually won by a low-speed maglev, the Krauss-Maffei Transurban, a choice that occurred while the committee was meeting. 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. Fate RTV 31 ended up at Cranfield University where it was kept