Were there any advantages over normal trains except cool factor?
They allowed for >250km/h speeds. They were basically competing technology and were developed at the same time as modern high speed rail (and lost).
Yes: speed. But if you weigh advantages against disadvantages (by far the largest being the need for completely new infrastructure), hover trains simply lost.
And not only in the UK, btw. Similar projects had been scrapped all over the world, for the same reasons.
I’m not sure about energy consumption; the video makes it sound like they used a lot of electricity but then I suspect normal high speed trains do as well.
I’m also unsure about the hovering being achieved by fans and not magnetic levitation. The video does not go deep enough there: was the former supposed to be supplanted by the latter, in time? I’m not an expert, but using strong fans to lift a 22t car off the tracks feels inferior to me, if magnets could achieve the same, probably consuming less energy and being less error prone.
According to the Wikipedia page the train did use ducted fans to hover. The big benefit there is the tracks are extraordinarily cheap, it’s just some concrete poured into a rough shape.
True, maglev requires more specialised tracks. Still, a whole new infrastructure - instead they ended up building a train that can swing to better adapt to their sometimes Victorian tracks.
