Clarkson's TGV12 Sport Train Coming to Beaulieu

The boys at Top Gear have a thing for reinventing modern transportation in a way that they call “ambitious but rubbish”. It makes for good television, and often times it also gets your brain ticking over a bit. One such attempt saw them trying to change the way we get around on two rails.

James and Richard went for the ‘luxury’ approach with a bunch of caravans that ended up burning to a crisp, but Clarkson’s TGV12 sports train, as he called it, survived.

The actual vehicle from the latest series of the popular TV motoring program has just pulled into the World of Top Gear Exhibition at Beaulieu. The ‘locomotive’ is really little more than an old Jaguar XJS convertible with some railway wheels and the ‘carriage’ is actually an old caravan with the top sawn off, some racing seats bolted to the floor and a massive spoiler on the back!

Yet, this simple creation successfully completed a journey from very near Leicester all the way to the outskirts of Loughborough and, unlike the train created by Hammond and May, did so without catching fire or getting clobbered by a real train along the way.

The World of Top Gear already features a collection of cars, created by the presenters, for some of their most ambitious challenges on the TV show over the years. Exhibition highlights include the Top Gear Enormodrome which recreates the feel of the Top Gear studio, where the TV show is filmed in front of a live audience.

We’d love to take the TGV12 for a short test drive without the caravan in tow.