Hardly a "gimmick". The NHRR's radio-controlled MU car was a test conducted for practical reasons. The McGinnis administration was investigating double-ended high speed passenger trains at that time. It was thought that the engineer in the front locomotive on a double ended high-speed passenger train might control the locomotive at the end of the train through radio control, either as a primary control mechanism or as a backup in case the air and/or electrical lines that ran through the train failed. There was also some interest in allowing trackside signals to govern some aspects of high-speed passenger train operation using radio control. For example, a stop signal would send a radio command to the train to stop. McGinnis also made some statements at the time to the effect that trains operated fundimentally like elevators in the sense that they go back and forth along a set of rails that both guide and restrict their movement along a defined pathway. In the same way that elevators had once had live operators, and these operators had been abolished through automation, McGinnis reasoned that at some point in the future train engineers might be replaced through some means of automated operation such as radio control.
