history

During the Victorian age rapid accelerations such as telephony, domestic electricity and steam trains were happening. In 1896 an electrified ambitious sea-faring train on stilts named 'Pioneer' designed by local Brighton engineer Magnus Volks was launched. He planned the  building of a completely new railway that would ‘travel through the sea’. To provide power to the car a series of trolley standards were set on the land side of the track supporting the trolley wire 21ft above the spring tide level.

Pioneer embodies the futuristic from 1896 and the fantastic, an ambitious and fragile touristic mode of travel that avoided the unpleasant 'mal-de-mer' sickness of being at sea in a boat. The train ran on tracks cemented into the rock pools. A similar system was already in operation across St. Malo harbour in Brittany but this was pulled along the rails by chain rather than being self-propelled, and ran through sheltered water not the English Channel.

Maybe this was not so different to contemporary far-reaching travel achieved by Elon Musk & SpaceX, Richard Bransons & Jeff Bezos' race to the edge of space in 2021.