America's Failed High Speed Tilting Train - The UAC Turbotrain

[Music] whilst the us doesn't spring to mind when you think about high-speed rail in the late 1960s it was the first place in the western hemisphere along with canada to have an advanced commercial high-speed tilting train service capable of 170 miles an hour 247 kilometers per hour it was powered by multiple gas turbine engines built like an aircraft by an aircraft company ahead of the french tgv and the british advanced passenger train but being first doesn't always mean that it is best and it suffered numerous problems that were not always down to the trains themselves and was rather ignominiously withdrawn from the us just eight years later this is the story of the uac turbo train [Music] [Applause] [Music] this video is sponsored by magellan tv michelin is a new documentary streaming service run by filmmakers that have a passion for their work magellan believes that spreading knowledge about human endeavors is key and their mission is to tell great stories to show how we got to where we are as we're looking at america's attempt at a high-speed train in this video i think you'll enjoy magellan's trains two centuries of innovation a film that looks at how france led the way in innovation on the railways from the very early days of steam right up to the groundbreaking tgv and how a whole new system of both tracks and trains were needed to be developed to create a world-leading transport network it also looks at the breakthroughs that were needed over 200 years to allow this to happen and if it might be possible at some point in the future to travel from one side of france to the other in just 30 minutes you can watch this and many more by getting your one month free trial by using the link for this special offer right at the top of the description below and i'm sure you'll enjoy watching michelle and tv as much as i have in the 1960s the increase in air traffic was causing a problem for the once dominant railways it was becoming easier to fly long distances by air and much faster than any train could match however on the shorter routes of a few hundred kilometers between major population centres trains could compete on a more level playing field stations were usually in the centre of populated areas and the trains were also quicker and easier to get on and off compared to an aircraft at out of town airports the problems the railways had was that the trains themselves were not very fast and they were usually limited by the tracks which often dated back to the beginning of the 20th century in the uk studies into the increase in passengers due to the introduction of the deltic engines on the east coast mainline concluded that for every one mile an hour increase in speed there was a one percent increase in passenger numbers normally if you want to go faster the curved sections can start to be an issue and limit the speed in some circumstances the track itself would be canted or banked but this was expensive to build and maintain it also wasn't suitable for some heavy freight trains so it was found that a maximum amount of cant for mixed traffic was around about six and a half degrees passenger trains traveling around flat curves fast were less of a problem so long as they weren't traveling so fast that they might come off for rails but it was more down to passenger comfort going fast around a flat curve generates a centrifugal force which pushes the train and everything inside it including the passengers outwards making it uncomfortable to sit difficult to walk and any loose items that might be placed on a table would be thrown outwards to combat this a tilting carriage system was developed now whilst talgo of spain is normally thought of as the leaders and inventors of the tilting trains in the 1950s the first tilting railcar was an american pendulum car built by the pacific railway equipment company in 1937. this was heavily influenced by aviation engineering with the chief designer coming from caltech and two other engineers from northrop aircraft the carriage was placed below the roll center on a special tilting mechanism so when it entered the curve the whole carriage swung outwards like a pendulum giving the passengers inside the feeling but it was still on the flat and without the dinner plates and glasses flying off the tables the result was that it could run smoother and could negotiate corners 20 faster three were built and used on different railways but with the start of the second world war development was halted and their use beyond that was not followed up however there are issues with this pendulum method as there is a delay between the onset of a curve and reaching the proper tilt angle naturally the carriage tilt angle would overshoot and oscillate as the lateral peak force is reached before settling down on slow-moving sharper turns such as negotiating multiple points or changing tracks the swaying from side to side could be quite disconcerting roll on to the 1950s and the chesapeake and ohio railway carried out studies into a tilting train using a second generation talgo suspension system which attempted to iron out these previous tilting issues these used a single axle bogie between the rail cars and the cars themselves sat lower than normal suspended from an a-frame centered on the bogey with a pivot near the top so they could swing outwards the linked cars meant that they couldn't be separated easily like normal rail cars so the train will be made up of three five or seven cars plus a diesel power cart each end one pulling and one pushing this also removed the need to turn the train around the power cars had two diesel engines one on either side of the car with a passageway in between them and a control pod above where the crew operated the train from at the end of a power car there were doors behind an opening no section this allowed the trains to be coupled together to make one long complete train so the passengers could walk from one end to the other the development of the train went on until the 1960s which coincided with the high-speed ground transportation act of 65 and the department of transportation looking at including high-speed rail services seeing an opportunity to get into a new high-speed rail business the united aircraft corporation or uac brought the patents to the chesapeake and ohio railway concept train to take part in the northeast corridor demonstration project which was sponsored by the department of transport two trains called turbo trains dot-1 and dot-2 were built by the pullman works in chicago before being sent to uac for study and testing by their engineers the biggest change uac had done to the design was to replace the diesel engines in the power cars with gas turbines to decrease the weight and this is where the new turbo train name came from being aircraft manufacturers they used turboprop gas turbine engines the st6 a modified version of the pratt whitney pt6 this was de-rated from its normal 500 horsepower to around 300 horsepower but were smaller and lighter than the diesels weighing in at only 160 kilograms each the st-6 also used what's known as a free turbine which acted as a torque coupler and remove a need for another gearbox each power car had three gas turbine engines linked by a mixing gearbox to drive the wheels whilst a fourth ran an alternator for the train's electrical power it also had electric traction motors so that in new york it could deploy a third rail pickup and run as an electric train in the tunnels and in grand central station in keeping with the aeronautical theme the whole train was built from aluminium in a similar way to that of an aircraft making it half the weight of a traditional diesel-powered train yet with higher strength this meant that it required less power to accelerate and maintain its speed and in tests on the main line between trenton and new brunswick new jersey in december 1967 one of the prototypes reached a top speed of 170 miles an hour or 274 kilometers per hour a record for a gas turbine powered train that still stands today in further tests on the boston to new york route with four stops the turbo train cut an hour off the existing time to match the speed the interior was styled like the first class section of an airliner with reclining seats and fold down tables in canada where they were also trialling the turbo train they were built by the montreal locomotive works the pr office of canadian national wanted to emphasize that this was a new start for the railways so they dropped the word train from turbotrain and called it the turbo in their advertising material when the press were allowed on the canadian trains for the first time they were less enthusiastic whilst the tilting train worked well on higher speed curves on sharper low speed curves like those in and out of stations the ride was said to be less composed and seemed to go around the curves in a series of jerks rather than a smooth action they also said the rail noise was also louder than on standard rolling stock canadian national ordered five seven car trains with plans to run two of them coupled together to carry a total of 644 passengers however on the canadian debut from toronto to montreal which included a lot of press the train struck a meat truck as it was crossing one of the nearly 240 highway crossings and nearly 700 agricultural and private crossings along the 330 or 534 kilometer route although the meat truck was cut in half the train was relatively undamaged apart from the nose doors and some panel damage which was replaced the next day this had proven the strength of the aluminium design but has also shown up a problem that would eventually add to its downfall this was that the high-speed turbo was running on normal tracks which had many hazards like crossings and carried other slower moving freight trains and other standard passenger trains in both france and japan when they opened their high-speed train networks tgv and the shinkansen they ran on dedicated high-speed tracks with no other traffic and crossings going either over or under the lines although the turbo trains used proven aircraft engines and technology their use in a train was new and proved to be a little problematic issues with the breaks in winter the suspension system gearbox and what uac called other minor problems meant that in 1971 the canadian trains went back to uac to be sorted out in 1973 canadian nationals sold two four car sets to amtrak who had taken over the u.s operations but an accident on a test run wrote off three cars of one of the sets when it was sideswiped by a freight train and the power car sale was cancelled when a sister unit caught fire and was burned out in 1975. in 1974 after a substantial modification program the turbo was reintroduced though on both the u.s and canadian services the much touted average 120 miles an hour or 193 kilometer speeds never materialized with the u.s versions limited to 100 miles an hour or 160 kilometers per hour and the canadian ones averaging 85 miles an hour or 136 kilometers an hour this was still faster than any of the other services by up to an hour but due to the track limitations it fell well short of what was expected certainly when compared to other countries high-speed networks amtrak removed their turbo trains in 1976 and tried to sell them to canadian national but due to their poor mechanical condition the cell fell through and they stood idle until they were eventually scrapped the canadian service was taken over by a via rail in 1978 and in 1979 one of the power cars on the last three train sets caught fire after an oil leak and whilst no one was hurt a rapid disembarkation was required and the power car and two coaches were burned out even though the turbo had a rocky start and a reputation for unreliability after its reintroduction the service was performing well and achieving over 97 availability up until it was withdrawn in 1982. as they say a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and in the case of the turbo trains the track infrastructure was that weak link but other external forces were also at work the oil price rises in 1973 removed the economic advantage of a turbo trains head of being cheaper to run whilst other turbine power trains like the early tgv and the british atp also ended up ditching their turbines for electric motors in the end the turbo trains became a failed experiment their inability to run at the high speeds promised due to the track conditions their complexity and running costs compared to the newer diesel electric trains did in the end for the turbo train what opec started in 1973 with the oil price rises and unlike other attempts at high speed trains none of them survived the scrapyard for future generations to visit and learn from this just went to prove that even if you have fast trains if you don't build the fast dedicated tracks to run them on then you don't have a high speed network so i hope you enjoyed the video and if you did then please thumbs up subscribe click the bell notification and share now for all of our patreon supporters out there we now have ad-free versions of the videos available before they go public on youtube and i'd also like to say a big thank you to all of those patreons out there for their ongoing support

Channel: Curious Droid

Views: 237,391

Keywords:

Id: cvWoalQNMrU

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021