On a clear, sunny day at a vineyard in the Northern California town of Ukiah, a most unusual train chugs through a field of barely budding syrah grapes. Well, it doesn't chug so much as whoosh, because this train—actually, a one-sixth scale train—doesn't rely upon a diesel engine or electricity to get around. It uses vacuum power and heavy duty magnets.

The 89-year-old man who built it believes it could change how the world moves.

That man is Max Schlienger, an accomplished engineer who owns the vineyard and leads his family-run company, Flight Rail Corp. Its sole product, the Vectorr system, uses a propulsion method like no other: Between the rails lies a PVC pipe, 12 inches in diameter, connected to a pump that can draw all of the air out of the pipe or fill it. Within the pipe you'll find something Schlienger calls a thrust carriage, which is connected to the train with powerful magnets. This carriage is about the size and shape of a large watermelon and moves back and forth through the pipe under vacuum power, bringing the train with it.

This weird but clever product works something like the vaunted hyperloop, but rather than shooting a pod full of people through a tube it shoots a carriage through a tube. And, like the people behind hyperloop, Schlienger remains convinced that it represents the future of transportation. "We’ll get someone, somewhere, to say we want to do it,” Schlienger says. “And we’ll put all our energy into it.”

Max

Schlienger stands well over six feet tall, with a rod-straight back, a nice head of white hair, and bright blue eyes. He still drives his GMC pickup, and during a drive across his vineyard pointed out the varietals he raises: cabernet, sauvignon blanc, merlot, syrah. In a good year, he harvests 500 tons, selling them to wineries.

After enlisting in the Navy at 17 at the tail end of World War II and serving on a submarine tender, the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, native spent several decades as an engineer, specializing in metallurgy, high-strength magnets, and nuclear waste management. He holds 24 patents for things like a "rotatable plasma torch," a "system for feeding toxic waste drums into a treatment chamber," and, of course, a "magnetically coupled transportation module." After selling his metallurgy company in the 1990s, Schlienger started raising grapes. Why not, he figured. He had the room, and it would be an interesting change after a career working in labs and factories.

But Schlienger is no Diocletian, quietly tending to his farm after a lifetime of hard work. Grapes are a sideline. What he really wants to do is bring the Flight Rail train to life.

Back to life, actually.

The Atmospheric Railway

Schlienger is reprising an idea railway engineers in England and France floated in the 1820s and ’30s, when people called it the "atmospheric railway." If you could separate the locomotive and its fuel from the rest of the train, you'd make the train lighter and the system more efficient. The system worked a lot like the Flight Rail, but instead of magnets a piston connected the thrust carriage and the train. The engineers lined the slot with leather to maintain the seal, and coated the leather with tallow to protect it from the elements.