be attributed to them. The concept of deploying tilting trains on the West Coast Main Line was not an original one. During the 1980s and 1990s, British Rail had developed several plans to introduce new trains and pursued the development of the revolutionary, but ultimately unsuccessful, Class 370 Advanced Passenger Train (APT) for a protracted period. Some years after the cancellation of the APT, British Rail had intended to replace the existing fleet of trains on the West Coast Main Line (in conjunction with a planned route modernisation) as part of the InterCity 250 project, but this was cancelled by the government shortly before the Privatisation of British Rail during the late 1990s. The original Pendolino order was for 54 nine-car units, costing £500million. As originally planned, a pre-series test train was scheduled to be completed and to be in active testing by July 2000, while the first Pendolino was to enter revenue service during March 2001. It was expected that the whole fleet would be delivered by May 2002. The Pendolinos were intended to run at service speeds of up to . Railtrack, therefore, embarked on a modernisation of the West Coast Main Line to allow for the faster line speeds. However, the programme ran into serious difficulties. By its end, it was almost four times over-budget, had been delayed by a number of years, and had not improved the infrastructure as much as had been planned. Consequently, and in a manner reminiscent of the introduction of the InterCity 225, the lack of signalling upgrades resulted in the maximum line speed being set at . Although the Pendolino's in-service top speed is well below British Rail's hopes for the APT, which was to reach up to , it does match the maximum speed of 125mph for the APT in passenger service. Fiat Ferroviaria introduced its first tilting trains during the 1970s. They were first operated on the Italian railways in 1976. Fiat Ferroviaria supplied much of the content of the Class 390, including the unit's bodyshell and the bogies, while final assembly was carried out at Washwood Heath. The tilting technology was developed by SIG Switzerland (later Fiat-SIG, today Alstom). Each car uses a pair of electromechanical actuators to achieve the desired tilting angle. The train can tilt to a maximum of eight degrees, at which point one side of the train is higher above the track than the