Guess what love...I ‘ve bought a train by mistake!

Andy Jones was “horrified” when his opening bid of £100 on internet auction site eBay landed him a Maglev – a magnetic levitation train.

Maglevs used to haul passengers between Birmingham Airport and Birmingham International rail station.

Andy, who owns the Town & Country Furniture store in Abbey End, found himself owner when a previous eBay bidder failed to honour the £25,100 pledged.

The Maglev carriage went back on eBay and Andy put in a light-hearted bid of £100 to “get the auction going”.

Now it’s in splendid isolation in a field by his home in Burton Green.

Andy said: “I kept looking on eBay but nobody else put a bid in. I was absolutlely horiffied when I realised it was mine,” he joked. “I did it on the spur of the moment – Lord knows why it did it.”

Andy has spent “a couple of hundred quid” on getting it from the airport to the field.

The airport built the Maglev line in 1984 and the carriages were suspended above the elevated track by electromagnetic force. But problems with its electrics and getting spare parts saw it scrapped in 1995.

Andy has offered it to rail museums but no institution can accommodate it.

“Now I’ve got a five-tonne train opposite my house. There would be a great use for it somewhere – it’s an iconic piece of engineering.”

The former engineer with the RAF and Rolls Royce has had to trim bits off, including cabling, to stop his two billy goats knibbling at it.

“Give a goat a clean carrot and it will eat it, leave it on the floor and it leaves it, but leave a Maglev out and it will eat it.”

The 60-year-old father of two added: “We’ve got no electrical drawings, no nothing. We could work something out but it would be better if the engineers or maintenance men who worked on it could give us some words of wisdom.”

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