A company from Corwen is to have one of its products fired at super-high speeds with famed American aerospace firm SpaceX.

Ruth Lee, who produce manikins for emergency services to rehearse and simulate rescues with, have produced a specialist manikin as part of a competition to help design trains to hit up to 760 miles an hour.

With trains between Edinburgh and London taking almost five hours, the Hyperloop will allow passengers or cargo to travel at speeds of around 760mph – cutting the journey to just 40 minutes.

HypED (The University of Edinburgh Hyperloop Team) is a finalist in the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition II, which challenges students to design and manufacture a half-scale Hyperloop pod to race. The team’s proposal has been successful, meaning they are now one of 24 teams competing in the event in California in August 2017

Ruth Lee Ltd is Europe’s leading manufacturer of training manikins and have been supplying mannikins to emergency services as well as to film productions such as Pan and Prometheus, and most recently for BBC’s Silent Witness crime drama.

Paul McDonnell, managing director at Ruth Lee Ltd said: “After researching the HypED project, we were so impressed by their high-tech, high-speed aspirations that we agreed to sponsor the team by supplying one of our Working at Height manikins.

“We export our products around the world and so the idea of high-speed transportation is very exciting. The HypED team are an incredible group of young people with ground-breaking ideas and we are sure their tests in California will be outstanding.”

The manikin supplied to HypED will travel with the team to California to be the “passenger” in their high-speed trials. It is already being used in the team’s lab for a range of tests which allow them to perfect their pod and ultimately reach extremely high speeds.

Jack Noble, spokesperson for HypED said, “Ruth Lee’s manikin will be passenger #1 in our pod which we have named “Poddy McPodface” and will race inside SpaceX’s vacuum test track in Los Angeles, California this August. The importance of promoting the Hyperloop as a form of transport for people is key, and having a life size manikin inside our pod will help demonstrate this.”