Wrong kind of software leaves Nasa's space train stuck in station

Apart from the fact that it took place 240 miles above Earth, the inaugural journey of the first railway in space yesterday would have seemed depressingly familiar to the average British train passenger.

The Mobile Transporter - a vital tool in the construction of the International Space Station - crawled for 5 metres (17ft) along its tracks at a speed just exceeding 2.5mm per second. Then it stopped, and did not start again.

"As you can imagine, we're having a big discussion," beleaguered Nasa ground controllers at Cape Canaveral in Florida told the astronauts. "The solution for this is probably going to involve a lot of manual commanding from the ground."

A spokesman said the $190m (£130m) railway was switched into safe mode because of a software problem and that the astronauts had been instructed to get on with other work in the meantime.

To be fair, the track is currently only 9.8m long, so the 2.7m car did make it more than halfway.

When the project is completed in several years' time, a 109m track - the longest fixed structure in space - will carry a giant 17.7m robotic crane from one part of the space station to another. At top speed, it will travel 10 times fas fast as yesterday's trial run.

Nasa says the railway is a complex part of the space station, second only to the scientific laboratory at the heart of the structure.

The final wiring work needed for the test journey was put in place during a six-hour spacewalk on Sunday by Steven Smith and Rex Walheim, astronauts from the shuttle Atlantis.

"Beautiful place we live," Mr Smith observed during the spacewalk - still unaware, at that point, that the trains didn't work there.