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Jet Turbine Locomotives
An anonymous submitter writes "I saw this article in the paper today. Not only is it lighter than a comparable diesel engine, it should burn the fuel more completely and be a bit better for the environment. Not to mention it is much faster. They should make more of a point that the North American railway system needs a major overhaul in order to support faster trains." The Department of Transportation has some information about next-generation trains, including a design incorporating a flywheel to improve acceleration.
Everyone must be getting this at once, because this was featured on TechTV not 5 minutes ago.
"What we have here is a failure to communicate"
The Warden, Cool Hand Luke
Union Pacific has a jet powered locomotive. They used to have more, but they burn so much fuel that they aren't very economical to operate. Plus, you can't park them underneath overpasses because the exhaust will melt the asphalt. So they just have the one now and it is mainly used for special loads and public relations.
Smeghead every day of the week.
This may be obvious to most people, but this train doesn't actually get thrust from the jet engine. The jet engine is used to power an electric generator, which in turn powers electric motors for the wheels. This is how diesel locomotives work too.
I'd guess the reason they say this locomotive is faster is due to the much lower power to weight ratio of the jet turbine compared to diesel engines. I don't see how this would make any difference on a fully loaded train, however, as the delta in weight between a jet turbine and a diesel engine has to be a small fraction of a percent of the overall weight of the train.
Just because it "burns fuel more completely" doesn't automatically make it safer for the enviroment. Nor did I see any more proof of this in the article. Jet fuel is some pretty nasty stuff, enviromentally speaking. Sounds like a market-droid speak to me.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Just an FYI, in case anyone is interested; the vast majority of commerical locomotives in the USA are already, in fact, electric, and have been since the 1950's. The diesel engines are there, sure, but they are there to generate power to turn electric motors.
This is because electric motors have many degrees more torque at low speeds than any comparable internal combustion engine.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
The turbine runs at a constant speed -- that is, it runs a electric generator which provides power to run the motors. The engine would probably be no louder than current diesel locomotives, and most likely quieter.
Having been a gas turbine mechanic in the US Navy (gas turbines are used to power the Aegis-class cruisers, Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, and Perry-class frigates), I can say that there are silencers that can be used in the exhaust which will keep the noise down quite a bit... jet airplances are "extra noisy" because the hot gas flows out the back pretty much unabated (small loss to continue turning the gas generator portion, but most energy is "lost" out the back in pure thrust), whereas in a turbine "prime mover" application, much of the exhaust energy is used up turning the power turbine / reduction gear / generator.
Plus the size of the turbines in these locomotives is probably similar to those in Huey/Blackhawk- sized helicopter... you can get a lot more HP out of a physically smaller gas turbine than you can from a diesel (the Navy gets 2500kW from a single Huey-sized turbine/ generator setup). And, to me anyway, the lower frequencies from a diesel are more "penetrating" than the higher turbine freqs...
Another turbine advantage is they can run on almost anything flammable, given the right nozzles etc. Some power plants actually burn pulverized coal in their turbines. They can also run on methane, LNG, etc... so if/when it becomes unfashionable enough/too expensive/whatever to power the trains with dead dinosaurs, they can switch over to something else... (methanol anyone?)
I've always thought a turbine-powered locomotive made a lot more sense from a size/weight/fuel economy point of view than a diesel engine... guess I shoulda patented the idea when I had it back in the mid-90s!
This isn't the first gas turbine locomotive that Bombardier has built. Back in the 70's and early 80's Via (Canada's Amtrak) had a gas turbine train (called the "Turbo") operating between Montreal and Toronto that was built by Bombardier. It wasn't as reliable as diesel engines and didn't offer any particular advantages. Gas turbine engines are considerably lighter than diesels and perhaps a bit more fuel efficient, but light weight isn't very important for a locomotive. I remember once watching the Turbo getting towed through Belleville ON by a diesel unit because there was a couple of inches of snow over the rails and the Turbo couldn't plough trough it.
Presumably, the turbine will drive a generator whose electricity output will drive electric motors as in a conventional diesel locomotive.
I think you meant diesel-electric .
Most heavily-used mainline railroads in the US do have continuously-welded rail. It's expensive and tricky to build correctly, so they don't bother with it on more lightly-used lines.
Same applies to concrete ties, bi-directional signaling, centralized traffic control, and all the other technologies that make railroads run faster and more efficiently.
is that they don't throttle well. They like to rev up, to VERY high speeds, and stay there. When attempts were made to use turbines in racing cars it was found that this made them very effective for oval racing, but nearly useless for road racing. They're even more useless for road driving with it's stop and start patterns.
They are, however, when used at constant rate, far more efficient than piston engines. This makes them good for turning generators.
This would make them good for *hybrid* cars, in which there is renewed interest. In fact, the locomotives that are in question here are conceptually the same as a hybrid car.
KFG
The M1 tank has a turbine engine also. Generally these types of engines are used in applications where a high power-to-weight ratio is required and cost is not the issue.
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks
Here's some information about the jet-powered M-497, tested in 1966 by New York Central. There's an interesting article about it in the Fall 1999 issue of Invention & Technology, if you have access to a copy.
Anyway, you've got to check out the pictures:
http://www.trainweb.org/railpix/ampix/nyc-m497s1.j pg 1 .jpg
http://www.trainweb.org/railpix/ampix/nyc-m497run
Most modern jet engines are high-bypass turbofans. A great deal of the exaust energy is captured in the turbine section and used to spin the big fan at the front of the engine. The result is that rather than generating thrust by ejecting a relatively small mass of exaust gas out the back at supersonic speeds, they pump a large quantity of air at subsonic speeds. The result is a quieter and more efficient powerplant.
n &file=/en/1_0/1_10/1_10_0.jsp
This doesn't really change your main point though. These aren't going to be as noisy as a jet engine.
I'm going to guess though that these turbines are going to be a lot bigger than the ones in a huey. Or maybe not: http://www.bombardier.com/index.jsp?id=1_0&lang=e
Looks like they are about half again as powerful. I was imagining a freight locomotive.
Sorry, dag - Union Pacific beat you to it by about 4 decades. Back in the 1960s they experimented with 10,000 HP gas turbines that burned Bunker C oil. Eventually, reliability problems and the rising price of price of Bunker C did them in. However, they screamed like banshees and weren't allowed in many parts of the UP system due to their noise problems. While I'm sure advancements in noise damping tech will help significantly, it's hard to keep something producing several megawatts quiet.
I doubt that existing trains will be able to be retrofitted with one of these things - at least, they won't be able to to take full advantage.
If you're trying to build a high-speed train, all the running gear has to be rated for that high speed. That means suspension, brakes, etc. etc, and applies to all the carriages, not just the locomotive.
Just adding one of these to a train would be like bolting a Formula One race engine in a Civic - it could probably be done, but it wouldn't be safe to use anywhere near its full potential.
Not to mention that train tracks have maximum rated speeds also, so if you upgrade to high-speed trains you have to upgrade to appropriate track standards. Such upgrades are potentially quite expensive (you have to widen bends to reduce lateral G's, for instance).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
That's just another way of saying "let the bondholders pay for the mess." Which isn't necessarily a bad idea, but someone ultimately is going to have to pay.
Let a new company with new vision and an eye towards the future of transportation develop a high tech train system in America.
There's not a single passenger train system in the world that isn't subsidised by some government. Cut the funding and you can expect ticket prices to rise and the number of passengers to drop sharply.
Of course in todays low interest rate environment maybe the system could be sustained, at least until interest rates start going up again.
We don't need old companies to make a new train system.
Considering that it's only old companies that have the capital to make a new train system, yes we do.
but the US and Canada, who still have these ridiculous diesel engines that are just not suited to getting people around
Umm...why not? The engine is locomotion unit, and whether it uses diesel, gerbils, or a squadron of nerds, it simply needs to move some cars. I use Go Transit to get to work, and they utilize diesel engines fabulously in a light rail system: Works superbly.
And so are diesel locomotives. I had the misfortune to attend an outdoor wedding that happened to be near a trainyard, and the ceremony was completely drowned out by a nearby idling locomotive.
Besides, as numerous posts have pointed out, this isn't a jet engine... it's a gas turbine generator. Closely related, to be sure, but not the same. A jet engine's purpose in life is to throw a whole lot of fast-moving air out the back; a turbine generator is designed to spin that turbine efficiently, and there's no reason why it has to move more air than is necessary to accomplish that task. A land-bound locomotive can also carry a lot of sound shielding that would be impractical on an airplane.
Finally, aside from the volume of generated noise, the quality of the sound is quite different. During the 70's and 80's a turbine-powered train (cleverly called the Turbo Train) hauled passengers across Canada; I worked near Montreal's downtown train station, and watched (and heard) the train come and go many times. The noise level was no worse than a diesel, and actually kind of interesting... it was a high-pitched whine rather than a low-pitched rumble, and I found it much less annoying.
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
Power isn't the issue, folks. Not when it comes to speed. A war-veteran GM E7 can exceed a safe speed on most track in the US. The problem is the track. And track is devastatingly, mind-bogglingly expensive. As a power-of-ten estimate, figure new track is going to cost around 1-10 million dollars per mile. I know that sounds absurd, but it's true. It's an engineering acomplishment along the lines of a major urban interstate highway, except it's like that everywhere. Not just the urban parts.
The big problem with rail is the same problem as the big problem with air: operators offer a product that the market will only pay the marginal cost for. The fixed cost (building either rails and trains or airports and planes) cannot be recovered. It's a guaranteed losing game.
But it's not all bad news. The attractive part is that the turbine may save fuel costs (modern aeroderivative turbines are fairly good, with net thermodynamic efficiencies in the 40% range) and it could burn a range of cleaner and more energy-independent fuels (the US at least *could* quickly become self-sufficient in natural gas production, for instance).
And yes, it does seem odd: it's being touted as a passenger solution when Amtrak is broke, and yet the interesting application is freight.
To quickly address a previous posting about weight: low weight isn't exactly an advantage for locomotives. The ability to climb grades is essentially a linear function of the locomotive weight. Steel wheels on steel track, non-spinning, is close to ideal newtonian friction. You need more downward force to make more tractive force. It's unavoidable. And stopping ability does, in practice, degrade with reductions in locomotive weight. The reason is that train operators love to use "dynamic braking." This is using the electric traction motor to make electricity, hence slowing the train. It's not regenerative... the electric power is used to heat resistor banks on top of the locomotive. This is why you see "heat waves" rising off of locomotives at urban stations: they spend much of their operating life slowing down. The friction brakes are used every so many minutes (because the FRA rules require it, so they don't rust up or even freeze in cold weather) but they're train brake shoes are expensive so you try to minimize their use. Besides, dynamic braking gives really smooth stops, and passengers appreciate that.
But I bet it sounds cool.
A tubine in this application would funnel its exhaust gas through a series of chambers that increase in size to transfer the energy in the the hot pressured air into work for both compressing intake air, and turning the shaft connected to the generator. It wouldn't power the train with high speed exhaust. Its actually pretty similar to a big turbocharger in an automobile. After it is exhausted, a muffler would rob some energy, through backpressure, but the turbine would get most of it. I don't know how loud these would be, Triumph, or another European auto company used turbines in one of their cars for a few years.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I think if we were to design a gas-turbine locomotive in 2002, the worries about fuel consumption, noise levels and exhaust emissions are no longer major issues, thanks to the efforts of GE, Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce in the last 25 years in dramatically reducing fuel consumption, noise levels and harmful exhaust emissions on airliner jet engines. A Turbo Train using a modified version of today's modern jet engines would be quite powerful, generate much less noise, have very low emissions and would be far more efficient than the old GE Big Blows that UP used during the 1950's and 1960's.
However, we still must eliminate a big problem with gas turbines: the hot exhaust from the engine. Both GE Transportation Systems and GM's EMD will have to figure out how to cool that exhaust in a very small space before we can build a modern gas-turbine locomotive. Remember, we're not taking about a ship, where there is plenty of space to either divert the hot exhaust or install various technologies in the exhaust stream to cool the hot exhaust.
Thus US rail passenger vehicles must be built to withstand impact with freight trains. Other nations have a far greater percentage of passenger-only track including many dedicated lines. Also in many nations the rail infrastructure has been continuously modernized resulting in more sophisticated switching and control system.
Amtrak inherited its system after decades of private neglect and was originally a way to prevent the various passenger rail services in the US from individually being shut down or sliding into bankruptcy. That passenger rail still survives in the US at all after decades of far less support then virtually every other transportation medium speaks to its tenacity and durability. Unfortunately Amtrak has always been stuck with conflicting missions and starved for infrastructure (again, much of what it began with was already obsolete or decrepit; upgrades, replacements and refurbishments have always been piecemeal and/or minimal.) That and impressively bad management.
Another problem has been the extraordinarily high strength requirement has been set by the US's Federal Railroad Administration which results in US rail passenger cars being at a minimum of twice as heavy as every other nation's. A result is that there is literally no other market for US vehicles thus tried & proven designs from other nations can't be used in the USA. Spanish, Swedish, German, etc. - none of their highly successful trains can now be imported into the US due to the FRA's unique requirements.
Thus when folks point out the curiosity of Amtrak hiring the consortium of Alstom/Bombardier to design & build the Acela instead of buying a successful somethingelse model they're ignoring that the somethingelses simply aren't allowed to run in the US on an ongoing basis. After license and redesign fees it would have cost more to convert an existing train then to just design & build one to Amtrak's (& the FRA's) unique requirements, which is what was done.
Of course now Amtrak & Alstom/Bombardier are mired in suits and counter-suits, ignoring the mediation structures built into their contracts and publicly blaming each other for the problems the Acela is facing. Amtrak claims the Acela doesn't meet specifications and was delivered late. Alstom/Bombardier claim Amtrak wasn't timely in providing specifications and making design decisions, many of the problems are with features Alstom/Bombardier advised against, and that Amtrak is running the vehicles on substandard track & caternary against Alstom/Bombardier's recommendations.
Of course much of this could have been avoided had the usual process of building a test train, running it ragged for a year, then dissembling it to examine it for understanding of it's rail performance, maintenance characteristics, wear patterns, practical experiance, then refining the design before going into production been followed. Indeed reexamination of the original train's evaluation appears to show the precursors of many of the problems now appearing on the Acela.
Instead however Amtrak ordered 20 trains in one design/build package (and now claims it'll never order another.) Thus as each trainset was built it was manufactured slightly differently from the ones before as experience was applied and improvements made. This now gives Amtrak 20 subtly different trainsets and no further application of the lessons learned nor incentive on the designer/manufacturer to refine the vehicle.
Whatever the case the losers are the citizens of the US & Canada. Why Canada? It turns out the money Amtrak used to purchase Acela Express was from a $1 billion low-interest loan from the Export Development Corp. of Canada. Yep, if Amtrak goes belly-up not only will the US public be out but also the Canadians. As you can imagine the prospect of a US quasi-governmental agency going belly-up and forfeiting on it's debts to Canada doesn't play well north of the border
Ironically there is a widely rumored proposal in Canada for investing CA$3-billion to improve train service in the Quebec City to Windsor corridor (incl. Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and possibly Kingston). The "VIAFast" upgrade is expected to take advantage of trains like Bombardier's newly (re)announced turbo train as well as track-swapping with CPR & CNR to create a dedicated passenger rail route. Indeed there's even renewed interest in a new high-speed Calgary-Edmonton corridor route to serve that rapidly growing part of the country.
Anyway, now you know why the US is stuck with slow trains: Inheritance, lack of investment, political game playing, lousy management, and extreme requirements. On the other hand neighbors in much the same situation are instead expanding their rail systems in logical yet ambitious ways. Makes me think of the tortiose & the hare...
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
So I take it you designed this train, then? Because the manufacturer says existing rail networks can be used, and I'm more inclined to believe the manufacturer than I am an anonymous coward...
People seem to have a short memory... does anyone remember the TurboTrain?
This train ran in Canada and the US until the late 70s. In had several problems which made it uneconomical to opperate, these problems were:
High fuel consumption
Noise
Turbines can be a very efficient power source, but only when running at their full RPM. A train such as TurboTrain has to stop at stations, as well as obay signals and speed restrictions. Therefore, because of this stop and go the train has to constantly do, the turbine is actually less efficient than diesel.
The bottom line is that this idea has been tried and it has failed. I'm afraid it's difficult to concider this announcment from Bombardier nothing more than vaporware.
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
Don't compare old-tech, experimental turbines with what's available now. The whole reason for this project is that turbines are *more* efficient than diesels, not less. If diesels were more efficient, they'd be the first choice for electric powerplants, and they're not- turbines are.
Another reason for this project is that the service requirements of a passenger train are different from that of a freight train. Passenger trains pull lighter loads, travel faster, and need to accelerate more rapidly. Most locomotive technology in the US was designed with pulling freight in mind. Even the passenger locomotives are based on freigh-pulling designs. This project is a clean-slate design, with a specific purpose in mind. It should fulfill that purpose much more efficiently.
Union Pacific did run about 30 of the GTEL (Gas Turbine Electric Locomotive) 8500 series on their lines in 1949 and they would haul mile-long trains at a swift 70 MPH. Their drivetrains could deliver about 8500SHP at the cars and were later upgraded to 10,000SHP! U.P. calculated that a single unit (thats a rail term for each car in a train, for you new to railroading) could haul 734 fully loaded rail cars at a steady 12 MPH!
o n- 02.htmt ml
BUT for the long hauls, a tender full of Jet-A was needed to quench thirst of the gas guzzlers and were subsequently retired in 1970.
These monsters of the rail line were the prime moneymakers of UP's lineup and did their duty without complant and with plenty of punch.
http://utahrails.net/all-time/all-time-loco-chr
http://www.riverraisinmodels.com/up8500.h
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Amtrak already does this, depending on your definition of "cheaply".
High-speed is made possible by the tracks, not the trains. The french TGV (the fastest - 515 km/h that's 320 miles per hour) is a souped-up ordinary train. No exotic technology, no fancy tilt mechanism, no esoteric power system. Just bigger transformers, faster traction motors, faster gearing and more powerful brakes.
But the track. Oooh, the track, it's a smoooooth gentle nicely laid ribbon of steel, designed to be travelled at speeds up to 250 miles per hour.
I plugged "JetTrain bombardier" into google and got postings on the railroad.net forums. Seems quite a few folks there are pretty skeptical. A good read, in all:
I D=5208
http://www.railroad.net/forums/messages.asp?Topic
just my blog and pix
Sure, easy retrofit.
The New York Central did this in 1966 by sticking some surplus J-47 engines onto a regular passenger rail car. The M-497 reportedly got up to 155-mph, occasionally leaving the tracks from time to time over grade crossings.
You can read more about it here or look it up in a back issue of Invention & Technology Magazine from several years ago.
Then there was the UP gas turbines, some steam turbines, and even some government research into nuclear-powered steam turbine locomotives.
In short, a lot of reseach as been done in this area.
Turbine B: Turbine > Gears > Wheels
Is Turbine B possible?
Not really. The great thing about turbines is that you can run them really hot. The bad thing is they are fragile to shocks. You run these things either at the limit of your metals or use something inherently fragile like ceramics(experimentally at least). This allows you to get a big temperature difference, which means lots of energy can be extracted (at least that's what all those thermodynaics equations seemed to be about.)
If you tried to run it direct to the wheels you'd probably have to run it so cool that any energy efficiencies would be lost. You also wouldn't get the acceleration you can get by putting electric motors under every car in the train, powered by single lightweight generator car.
Sorry, dag - Union Pacific beat you to it by about 4 decades.
Actually, the LMS has that beat by about 30 years. See this.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Umm.. I think the mass/power ratio is another benefit. There's a reason these things are used on planes and its not because the engineers couldn't figure out how to make a piston work.
In reference to a plane the mass/power ratio is very important. In locomotives cost/HP is much more important. Of course cost includes initial cost, operating cost, maintance cost, oppertunity costs due to unexpected downtime etc.
I suspect the total cost of ownership is the reason we don't see these all over the place now. When it comes down to numbers, it is just cheaper to use the old technology.
With an electric wire on top, adding to the cost. The point of this train is, presumably, that you don't need to electrify the system. It'll still be expensive to upgrade the rails and reroute the track in parts, but not as expensive as the TGV.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Working for the manufacturer (Pratt & Whitney Canada) of the turbine engine for the JetTrain (truly a misleading name, but I'm not in Marketing) I can give you some facts: The turbine is a ST40 that produces about 5000 HP, weighs about 3000 lbs (about 38000 lbs less than a comparable diesel engine). The cyclic power demands are definately a concern for the turbine, but improvements in cooling within the engine remove any worrys. As for the mention of the the train with 10 1960's era PT6's: 10 engines @ ~350HP = 3500HP weight: 10x400lbs = 4000lbs BTW Bombardier has to add about 6000 lbs of dead weight to the locomotive to ensure proper traction...
Sigh,
Time for gas turbines 101. Here's the biggest difference betwen Gas turbines and Diesels. A diesel can idle on almost no fuel whatsoever, that's why you hear them idling all the time. The fuel/wear and tear it takes to start them vastly outweighs the fuel needed to run them for an hour or eight. Because they use a reciprocating compressor, and a reciprocating compressor maintains is efficiency accross its speed and horsepower band (actually dropping off at the top end) you can turn them down to zero HP out and the fuel going in drops to 1-5% of max power.
GT's have a compressor which relies on the velocities of the compressor blades and the air mass flowing through the compressor to make its magic happen. You dump all the vibrating, clanking, and flailing parts of a recip engine and rely on the momentum/dynamics of the working fluid to get a gizmo which takes 14.4 PSI air at the front and shoves 200-300 psi air out the back with one moving part which is in perfect rotary balance.
The problem is: It only performs this miracle in a small RPM range. Slow down by 10% and the efficiency goes to pot. Long story short, GTEs have only one fuel flow setting, ON. that's why the military was working on an APU for the M1 Abrahms tank. IT would keep the housekeeping electrical systes running without throwing all the fuel away!
There have been advancements in GTEs. Variable inlet stators allow them to have a somewhat broader band of acceptable efficiency. I would not be surprised to see that this engine has intercoolers between the compressors stages. This is a BIG help to efficiency (less HP needed to crank the compressor). This is not done in AC engines because intercoolers are bulky, but not heavy. The second thing you COULD do in a train is to use a recuperator. The takes the nice cool compressed air, and heats it with the exhaust air. Saves on fuel big time, reduces the noise and and the thermal plume of the engine. Again bulky but not heavy.
Modern, digitally controlled, intercooled, rucuperated, gas turbine engines are bone head simple to operate and basically have squat for moving parts and maintenance needs. And they're light. Damn light. Mostly air in fact.
Modern Turbochanred intercooled diesels are damn efficient too. Comfortably close to Carnot efficiency. BUT the massize engine block needed to take the reciprocating pistons is god auful heavy. Damn near a solid block of iron.
Modern diesel freight engines need to be heavy because they need lots of traction to get moving. A passenger train hauls mostly air and aluminum. People weigh squat next to 100 ton freights. That's why passenger cars are so long. They're full of air. Its posible for this type of passenger train to weigh 1/20-1/100 of a freight train with the same HP. A lightweight engine will impose much smaller dynamic loads on the track system.
A big limiting factor is the engine weight. Modern high speed/non electric passenger trains have big fat engines up front. In europe, they offload the engine by using overhead electric power.
This is an interesting solution to the speed problem. I hope it works.
> The french TGV (the fastest - 515 km/h that's 320 miles per hour)
> is a souped-up ordinary train.
Pretty "ordinary" yes... but there's one striking feature that differs from ordinary trains:
On a normal carriage, you have two boogie wheel pairs, one on each end of the carriage. On the TGV two carriages shares the same boogie in the intersection. Picture here: TGV boogie
This picture is actually from a tilting prototype of the TGV.
You can read more about the modifications to the TGV (Train Grande Vitesse) here, and some history here.
//TheToon
Have you ever heard a modern gas turbine? The things make this high pitched whine that is annoying as hell. Personally, as far as noise goes, I much prefer the deep bass rumble of a 12-cylinder, 188-liter-displacement diesel redlining at 1200 rpm. I like being able to feel trains coming from several hundred yards away. But that is really neither here nor there - I'm sure you are right, modern turbines are much quieter than older experimental ones.
Don't want to get all train-spotty anoraky here, but the Swiss firm of Brown-Boveri produced the world's first gas turbine locomotive during the Second World War ! A project was set up in Great Britian immediately after the end of the Second World War to fund the development of a gas turbine powered locomotive to find a alternative to steam and diesel traction. This was before nationalisation and the two companies jointly behind it were the Great Western Railway and Metropolitan Vickers. The Swiss Locomotive Company produced their loco with a gas turbine built by Brown-Boveri in 1950. It was BR No 18000; one powered by a Metropolitan Vickers engine became 18100 delivered in 1952. The engine underwent testing and trials and went into mainline service on British Rail's Western Region. There were problems and failures and BR 18000 was taken out of service in 1959 :-)
Another problem I've heard about these was that when one of the locos was under a bridge idling, waiting for a block to clear (I think), it actually burned a hole in the asphalt road and it leaked into its ezhaust. I may have to find that again in one of my locomotive compendiums.
As far as the noise went, I know that most cities prohibited their use and they spent most of their time in the vast expanse of the sparsly populated Midwest.
"And they smell just as bad as diesel trains"
I think there is one problem with that... in the US, we have sub-standard diesel. We have a much higher sulfur content than Europe, which is the reason for the odor. One of the reasons diesel in Europe costs more than in the US is that the process of removing more sulfur will cost more... and the US is roughly 5-10 years behind on sulfur content.
I won't hypothesize about oil companies, etc., but I will say - I drive a diesel. I will buy another diesel soon. If I could afford to, I would purchase a new VW diesel, simply because they run cleaner, better, and longer... the difference in speed and the difference in volume between diesel and gas engines have changed greatly, you can no longer hear or smell a difference (when comparing a modern gas to a modern CDI or HDI engine).