The history of the willy-shaped train can be traced back to the early 1970s, when British Rail decided it would be a good idea to go very fast between London and various regional cities. Of course, given the cities that were looked at (Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow), the fact that the rail route between them was not built in a straight line should have told them that people really didn't want to get to them particularly quickly. The new train was the Not Quite So Advanced Passenger Train, which was designed to tilt. This had two benefits: