Luke McGee tweets:
The wikipedia link is about a project from 1869, which propelled passengers a grand total of a hundred yards. Mr Beach, its onlie true begetter was defeated by Mayor ‘Boss’ Tweed and a stock-market crash.
Let us celebrate Charles Vignoles (engineer) and William Dargan (the contractor) who took, and made work an 1839 patent trialled at Wormwood Scrubs. This was the Dalkey Atmospheric Railway, which operated for ten years from 1844. It gave Brunel the notion for his short-lived effort, the South Devon Railway.
Vignoles’s implementation worked, while Brunel’s didn’t. The difference was Devon rats, who took a liking to the oiled leather used for closing the vacuum tube, while Vignoles used a metal protection.
So we have a permanent reminder (and an instructive example of translation problems) where the Dalkey pump house once stood:
Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service 
Yes the Atmospheric Railway is an old idea which Elon Musk has recycled with his Hyperloop. And the Hyperloop, I rather suspect, will be made redundant by advances in autonomous transport technology. But heigh ho, he has enough boodle.
The gem in that wikipedia entry involves “Frank Elrington, son of Charles Richard Elrington”, who:
“was in a single carriage that had been uncoupled from its train and unknowingly engaged to the pipe at Kingstown when the pumping engine started up. The journey to Dalkey was claimed to have been completed in 75 seconds at an average speed of 84 miles per hour (135 km/h).”
The citation is to Garrett Lyons, “Steaming to Kingstown and Sucking Up to Dalkey: The Story of the Dublin and Kingstown Railway”. That must qualify as one of the more desirable and ambiguous paperback titles.