[attach id=238505 size="medium"]Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 2.[/attach]

Spider-Man’s webbing really could stop a train if it recreated what exists in nature, research has shown.

In the film Spider-Man 2, the superhero shoots strands of the material at surrounding buildings to prevent a runaway train plummeting to disaster.

The scene seems far-fetched even by Hollywood standards, but not according to a group of young British scientists investigating the amazing properties of spiders’ silk.

They calculated that, scaled up to Spider-Man proportions, it would be strong enough to halt a four-car New York subway train travelling at full speed.

The three University of Leicester physics students worked out the force needed to overcome the train’s momentum – an enormous 300,000 Newtons.

To avoid breaking, every cubic metre of Spider-Man’s web would have to soak up almost 500 million joules of energy.

Incredibly, one spider spins silk that is up to the job.

Darwin’s bark spider, from Madagascar, creates orb-shaped webs tougher than any other known and more than 10 times stronger than Kevlar.

One of the young scientists, Alex Stone, 21, from Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, said: “It is often quoted that spider webs are stronger than steel, so we thought it would be interesting to see whether this held true for Spider-Man’s scaled up version.

To avoid breaking, every cubic metre of Spider-Man’s web would have to soak up almost 500 million joules of energy

“Considering the subject matter, we were surprised to find out that the webbing was portrayed accurately.”

The research is published in the latest issue of the University of Leicester’s Journal of Physics Special Topics.

Each year, the journal features original short papers written by Master of Physics degree students.