The experimental three phase railcar was a pair of high voltage alternating current powered railcars built in 1903 by the German firms Siemens and Halske and AEG on commission from the Society for the Study of High Speed Electric Railways, known by its German initials as StES, a research consortium formed in 1899 to investigate whether electric traction could make high speed rail practical. In tests that same year the cars set a railway speed record of two hundred ten point two kilometers per hour, a figure that stood as the overall railway speed record until the Schienenzeppelin broke it in 1931 and that remained the electric traction speed record until 1954, demonstrating for the first time that electric motive power could move a train at genuinely high speed. The three phase system that powered the cars proved too complex and too expensive to adopt widely at the time, so the projects technology was not carried forward into everyday service despite the record it set.
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