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The Improbable Story of the 184 MPH Jet Train
MatthewVD writes Almost half a century ago, New York Central Railroad engineer Don Wetzel and his team bolted two J47-19 jet engines, throttled up the engines and tore down a length of track from Butler, Indiana to Stryker, Ohio at almost 184 mph. Today, the M-497 still holds the record for America's fastest train. This is the story of how it happened.
....there were electric trams in New York. Then, a major US corporation named GMC lobbied to have them shut down and replaced with fossil-fueled rubber tired buses.
The result is the situation we enjoy today. Not a random act of destiny, but more an act of corporate greed, irresponsibility and old fashioned govt. graft. Welcome to America.
Yes, I know, I know. The crazy Libertarian talk. But that is, what happened — a combination of government regulating the cost of tickets, while imposing heavy taxes and building highways, where automobiles — both passenger and goods-carrying — could travel for less and less.
And then Amtrak took over all passenger rail-travel, and has never shown a profit since — losing money on the most idiotic things — while, demanding the passengers "carry identification at all times"...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Where we're going, we don't need roads.
Such fast. Very speed. Wow.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
So in 1966 it took two jet engines to reach 184mph.
Whereas in 1938 it took only a quite ordinary, in-service steam train to get to 125mph.
Does anyone think that, by comparison, the jet-engine thing isn't really that impressive?
You realize the J47 is a GE jet? Of course they're going to have a "look what cool stuff has been done with our crap" story or five. It's prolly the only place you can find that story told in a semi-reliable fashion anymore.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Americans bring jet engines on their 180mph trains. Conclusion: Americans are so much more bad ass than Europeans. Now get off the track that runs through my lawn, you socialist hippie.
This was mostly a publicity stunt by the New York Central, done on a very straight, well-maintained piece of track. The fact that they pulled it off does not mean that they could have run regular high-speed service at high speed over curves, grades, switches, etc. without prohibitive maintenance costs and serious risks of derailment.
Trolleys were ripe for the plucking when GM came around: farmers and other shippers had gotten state and local governments to pay for paving roads, while the trolley companies had to pay to maintain poles, wires, rails, etc. and were often charged with a portion of the costs when their public right-of-way was repaved. In some cases, the trolleys were subsidiaries of the electric utilities that furnished their power, which could then cross-subsidize them, but when the Insull utilities collapsed in the Great Depression, Congress passed the Wheeler-Rayburn Act and killed off that dodge. What GM got spanked for was trying to monopolize the "bustitution" market, but it was bound to happen anyway once massive public spending on paved roads began.
That says something about the state of train travel in the US. That ain't nothing to be proud of: there are trains in Europe and Japan that have been running regular services at higher speeds for a long time.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Why can't you get your act together with high-speed rail?
No one is saying to build cross-country HSR. Start off with regional hubs. Then expand from there. Or do you Amerifats prefer being groped by the TSA to getting on a train?
In Europe, they discovered that train wrecks were really, really bad. So they set about building a system of trains that didn't wreck, with numerous controls and systems to prevent collisions, resulting in an excellent safety record and low cost.
In the United States, they discovered that train wrecks were really, really bad. So they set about building a system of trains that survived wrecks with minimal injuries, with heavy crash cages and crumple zones in order to gracefully survive collisions, resulting in an excellent safety record and ridiculous costs.
Making a US train go as fast as an EU train is very difficult to do feasibly, since it weighs at least 4x as much per passenger.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Meanwhile, the Japanese Shinkansen (Bullet Train) started regular commercial service a full two years earlier in 1964. Shinkansen now routinely exceed 200mph, although the first ones (Series 0) ran at 137mph.
For those that have never used the Shinkansen, they are truly awesome. They leave and arrive to the scheduled minute. There is no TSA bullshit, so you can arrive at the station a few minutes before departure. There's loads of leg room. For any journey less than around 3-4 hours there is no point thinking about air travel.
Amusingly, the Shinkansen actually makes Japanese domestic airports more efficient as well. After all, the more crap a traveller has to deal with at the airport, the more likely they are to take the train. Thus, there is no TSA bullshit at Japanese domestic airports and you can arrive 10 minutes before your flight and easily make boarding.
Your fastest train of all time doesn't even make the top 10 current passenger trains normal running speed.
That jet-powered locomotive was neverintended as a useful means of propulsion. It was just to test track-train dynamics at higher speed. Not much was done with the info, since Amtrak wasn't into high speed rail.
The next big advances in high speed rail were Japan's Tokaido line and San Francisco's BART, both around 1970. The original Tokaido trains had conventional wheel arrangements, and required a very good and very high maintenance roadbed. The SF BART system had the first trains with an active suspension, with each car body supported on a triangle of three air bags controlled by electronic controls. This allowed a higher body height at higher speed, allowing more wheel travel and a softer suspension. Also, all wheels were powered, as is normal in transit operations.
The French TGV brought both of those ideas together - high speed plus active suspension with more suspension travel, with all wheels powered. This allowed high speed trains without excessive track wear. (That's a big problem with high speed rail. A French test in 1955 reached 331 km/h, but damaged the track seriously in only one run. There were serious doubts for years whether steel wheel on steel rail could ever go that fast in routine operation.)
As with cars, there's been more than enough power to go fast for decades. Wheel and suspension issues are what limit speed.
They bolted the engines? What does that mean? They threw bolts at the engines while they were running?
Wouldn't it have been safer to bolt the engines TO something?
English, people.
Railways have the highest fixed costs of any transportation system. 25%, I was told 30 years ago when I worked on one.
High fixed, low variable cost. So adding one freight car = dirt cheap. Going one mph faster on a curve = very expensive, due to increased wear on rails, road bed, etc.
There is also the not small problem of grade. Trains dislike hills, with a grade over 1% being excessive to them. Cars routinely handle ten times this.
Grades dictate routes. The only way around this is tunnels & bridges. Either way, cost per mile for a track is much higher than for a road. With costs born by one company, rather than all of us.
It is a fundamental problem, that leads to the division of bulk (slow) hauling = railways, people & fast hauling = trucks/cars.
I come here for the love
The French or Japanese trains are electric which means they don't carry their own fuel. A jet powered train has to carry a huge amount of jet fuel just like a diesel engine or a coaler. Which is practical only where fuel is very cheap and you have a large capacity storage tank AND there's no electrified option.
One needs overhead wires, the other doesn't. Electrifying a track only makes sense on relatively short easily reachable sections. Reason? If a wire breaks, it would suck if trains for hundreds of miles can't ride while waiting for a repeair truck to travel for days to reach the site. So okay, this has little effect in say England where even Wales can be reached by a determined expecdition in under a week with barely any casualties, but in the desolation the is the USA, it creates an issue.
It also requires constant power to be supplied to the entire network, this is fine on a denseley traveled network but there is a reason they turn of the power at night on some railroads.
So, comparing trains that get their power from an external source to those who don't is rarely going to make sense. There still is a place for trains the generate their own power.
Also jet engines have come a LONG way since then, in fact there are jet engine powered trains in use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_turbine-electric_locomotive
What limits speed the most is corners, length of track and stopping distance.
Few things corner well at speed and you can only bank corners so far (as far as it would take for the train to fall of the tracks because fo the bank if it had to stop).
Trains also take time to get to speed and time to stop, there is no having a super fast train that can't get to speed before it has to stop again.
That is why it takes longer from the outskirts of Amsterdam to the central station then from any of the inter city stations around it the outskirts of Amsterdam. Straight rail with no crossings vs twisty track with lots of tracks merging, all at the same level.
TGV and Shinkansen (bullet trains) both got around this by simply building large straight sections between stations. Plenty a bullet train station said FUCK YOU to the existing train stations and just build a station on top of it, to give it the straight track needed for high speed.
The Brists and the Japanese Narrow Gauge networks had to try to make trains that lean into corners because these networks are all corners.
Power is indeed easy but making that power usable without launching the entire train or going 10 in 10.000hp train is the hardest trick of all, urban planning.
The track bed for a UK standard railway is about 11ft (4'8 1/2" for the track, 6ft between tracks, plus change for the rails themselves). You won't find many highway lanes that narrow.
This "train" (debatable if it's a train if it's only one vehicle) would only hold the record for the fastest conventional wheeled train in the US anyway.
The record for the fastest railed vehicle in the US - hey, even the world - is more than an order of magnitude faster. I'll pass on having a ride though.
The prototype TGV was powered by dinosaur juice - I believe they swapped to electric mainly because of an increase in oil prices. Maintenance was probably also an issue (the prototype was gas turbine-electric which has a terrible record in the rail industry).
But yeah, electrification is the only sensible option - you're fixed to the route of the track anyway (or if not you've got bigger worries than where your power's coming from) so why not stick some OHLE alongside.
One needs overhead wires, the other doesn't. Electrifying a track only makes sense on relatively short easily reachable sections. Reason? If a wire breaks, it would suck if trains for hundreds of miles can't ride while waiting for a repeair truck to travel for days to reach the site.
Why people talk without knowledge of what they talk about?
I am from Europe, worked for the French and Spanish rail systems. You wont believe it, but we have batteries of all sorts, and other eventualities stuff.
If a wire breaks, mainly after lighting storms, repairing it takes hours, not days. Most of the time you could send energy from other place in 5 minutes, so the service is not interrupted.
The biggest problem we had was mechanics, like fracture on wheels and axis, detecting and controlling the size of fracture lines and so on. Electric motors and electric cables are orders of magnitude more reliable and simple than heat engines, let alone jet engines. Very few moving parts and very very simple.
I routinely have to travel from Dayton Oh to Knob Noster Mo. It is an 8 hour drive, Flying into their regional airport which is an hour away takes about 7 hours and I have been stranded there because even though I had a reservation there were no cars to be rented. The other option is going to Kansas City which has a 90 minute drive on the end of it and takes 7.5 hours all together. Flying through the southwest it's even worse as small regional airports can be over an hour away and larger airports over two hours away. Traveling from Alamogordo NM to Colorado Springs Co by plane takes 7.5 hours while driving takes 7 hours. Maybe it's because the Air Force keeps all its bases away from large airports but I know many places where driving 8 hours is just as good of an option as flying.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Yeah, it competes with road funding, but Amtrak also takes huge funding from the government, too... near 30% of operating expenses or about half of revenue:
Bloomberg: "After automatic budget cuts, Amtrak is getting $1.3 billion in taxpayer money for fiscal 2013, with $905 million of that going to capital costs and debt service, Kulm said. That’s less than the $1.4 billion the railroad received the previous year."
Amtrak: "In FY 2012, Amtrak earned approximately $2.877 billion in revenue and incurred approximately $4.036 billion in expense. No country in the world operates a passenger rail system without some form of public support for capital costs and/or operating expenses."
It may be a good social service, but it's a lousy business, and it is nowhere near self-sufficient.
I wish we had a self-correcting apostrophe (knows the difference between its and it is).
The LIMRV hit 188 in 1972 and 256 in 1974.
This Budd gizmo isn't even close.
And he is not very fond of Butler Indiana either, and he would have gotten the hell out of there as soon as possible too.
What do you think he was doing? Not everybody had the panache to leave on a jet powered train. He gets serious points.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
TL;DV - but it seems that the the demonstration was a single car/engine. Does that count as a "train"?
But what about the right of ways? I can't speak for Europe but here in the US most Railroad ROWs that I have encountered are at least 66' wide, or about the same as an average road. Only the railroads usually own the land not just have an easement over it as with most local/county roads. But for some reason the newer ROWs are 100-150' wide, some areas are up to 300' wide. I'd estimate they own over 1000 acres of land collectively for only 100 miles of active track. That's probably well over $6 Million for the land alone.
Try that today and there would be not only bureaucrats in your way but bureaucratic engineers who would complain about the metal in the tracks, the wheels, the bearings, everything.
I find that so little of human accomplishment today is real, it tends to be more accountants and PR people who have a long checklist having to explain why their product is better. Elon Musk must make these kinds of people weep; by saying what he is going to do in plain English and then doing it. He doesn't have to explain why a Tesla is different.
http://www.forumsforums.com/3_9/showthread.php?t=62716
OK a new size TV