The Tragic Failure of Jet Trains

this video is brought to you by Squarespace whatever happened to jet power [Music] trains this is the fastest train to ever run in North America and yet you can't go on it and the record has never been broken it used two engines from the mighty b58 nuclear bomber it ran from New York Grand Central Station and it was built way back in 19 66 that's 57 years ago what on Earth happened how did America the most powerful country in the world failed to grab the future of highspeed rail that was right in front of them and why jet powered trains never took on this is the express service not taken the ultimate jet powered rail car the m497 black beetle in the early 1960s trains were dying thanks to the construction of the interstate system Americans now could simply Drive between cities much faster than going to a train station and riding around on a pre-war shabby wooden train and at your destination you also now had your car so when cars looked like this why wouldn't you but it was the rise of jet aircraft that was a game changer gone was the typical prep power plane that was loud and uncomfortable and now the new hotness was powerful aircraft that could fly nearly 600 mph with jet engines it was a game Cher so the vast rail Monopoly saw the writing on the wall and realized that they would need to evolve or die they pondered that if they could adopt the same aircraft model having Hub stations with high speed trains between them with passengers transferring then to slower local lines they might as very very well wrestle back their Glory Days however speed was the important factor and the last time the land speed record was broken by a train in North America was in 1893 yes by a steam train going a 112 mph so needless to say the railways of USA needed to innovate yesterday say that five times fast fortunately one Railway Monopoly New York Central Railroad was on the ball and had a DED a team of Engineers looking at how to make trains better safer and faster in 1963 a concept emerged from their team at their development tech center employing a jet engine to power the locomotive they contemplated the possibility of integrating a Rolls-Royce Dart Turbo prop engine originally from the Vic's Viscount aircraft into an emdf unit James J Wright the director of the tech center at the time proposed the notion of experimenting with a pure jet engine to the head of the New York Central Railroad Al Peron but the idea was initially deferred as a silly Overkill engineering fantasy but the concept remained would a jet power train on an existing track actually work well it seems like the engineers never gave up on the idea and continue petitions got the director to change his mind and a year later he called them up and said if you can do it in 30 days then you have yourself a deal the green light was given and the team got to work there is one thing that you need to keep in mind that these Engineers back then had the balls to stick two jet engines on top of a train car and call it a day can you imagine if they had the power of the fluid engine on top of this what else they could have accomplished now I'm not talking about some crazy Thomas a tank engine sentient but rather the fluid engine from Squarespace today's video sponsor and hold your horses because I got a preview of the next video right here and it's going to be a big one so don't miss out the Squarespace fluid engine allows you to take any of their thousands of templates or even make your own using drag and drop technology to make a completely custom responsive website how responsive you ask well it can fit onto a Mobile screen or be projected onto a movie theater without having to be redesigned not only does Squarespace have the ability to run marketing campaigns right on the platform to bring in more visitors it can also run a whole online store with no extra coding you just got to add your products in fact it's what I use for my own brand of merch found and explain dot shop for everything thanks Squarespace but now I have my own treat for you for watching my little Channel about trains you can try Squarespace for free at www.squarespace.com so not only do you get my gratitude for making all of this YouTube possible but you also get a sick discount because of the absolute time crunch the team decided to essentially take an existing rail car and slap some jet engines on top don't you just love the 1960s the New York Central Railroad decided to use number m497 2016 a bud RDC 3 that was 13 years old this was a self-propelled diesel commuter car that sat 48 passengers in a 2x2 configuration across 12 rows and featured both baggage and a railway post office compartment known as a beiner on the New York City Railroad they transported it to the Collingwood Technical Center in Cleveland where modifications were made including detaching the drive shafts from the engines after all it wouldn't need to use its diesel motors to power itself to accommodate a jet engine mounting structure several passenger seats were removed in the baggage compartment over 50 instruments were installed to monitor speed stress bearing temperatures and ride characteristics and the post compartment was modified to house fabricated fuel tanks for the jet engines the original Wheels were then also replaced with ones that had cylindrical Treads to give it enough grip on the track and a small radio transmitter were attached to the front axles to send stress data back to the onboard recorders but the upgrades didn't stop there for the cockpit air quotes they managed to secure the pilot seat of a Boeing KC 97 Strat tanker and whilst all of this technology may seem like Cutting Edge for 1966 the New York City Railroad had actually been employing similar Technologies since the 1930s they regularly use baggage cars fill to the brim with different testing Technologies to monitor track and locomotive performances so this was right up their Alleyway but now it was time for the jet engines somehow and I can't figure out the story behind this but the team managed to get two Surplus J 4719 turbojet engines from the conve b58 nuclear bomber program this program was starting to scale back in 1966 hence the abundance of materials of the aircraft and these apparently happen to be the cheapest engines that they could get their hands on but where to put them initially the head engineer of the project Don Wetzel flipped the engines and put them at the back of the rail car but but his wife looked at it and said it should be at the front ironically this was not only more aesthetic but it made the front of the train car heavier and prevented the nose from lifting off the track at speed his wife would actually contribute far more than you might imagine during this initial development with Ruth wetel sketching out the preliminary appearance and paint job including the flaring at the front and also help with the Wind Tunnel tests the futuristic gray and silver look gave the media plenty of material to work with and before you know it the black beetle was born overall the entire construction only cost around $30,000 which is around $330,000 today so that's actually very cheap for a prototype product now that the jet power train was built it was time to test it now the whole point of this experiment was to prove that alternative Locomotion such as using jet engines could work on existing track and other test projects had failed thanks to delays in test track construction thus the strip of New York Central Mainline between Butler Indiana and Toledo Ohio was chosen it was 68 Mi long consisting of multiple lines and fit the typical characteristics of their track of the time the single m497 rail car was towed to its position and on a warm summy morning of July 1966 it was powered up for its first solo run but who would drive it well it turns out that the perfect person was the chief designer Don witzell one of the main reasons why Dom was chosen as the test engineer was in fact that he was a pilot and a locomotive engineer qualified in the operations of diesel engines jet powered aircraft and even steam trains yes he was actually also the last steam train engineer trained in the United States so talk about the perfect man for the job and a side note the decal saying Pride of the central was removed because the team feared that it referred to Dawn himself not the train that they built the first few tests of the train was moving around 50 mph to test an all important braking system and that's where the first floor was discovered the heat from the jet engines passed over the radiat from the diesel engines and while the diesel engines were not used for Locomotion they were used to power the air compressor brakes so the jet powered train couldn't slow down like a movie with Kiana Reeves a quick snip of the emergency overheat cable and the problem was solved next they needed a way to make sure the track was clear for faster runs as it would be going fast enough that breaking in time would be a problem the team decided to employ a beach d18 to fly along the railway line and be a spotter aircraft ironically during later tests the train would start to go faster than the plane under the conditions of the test at the time and thus they needed to have a team member at every Crossing along the whole test track so talk about a highquality problem on the second run of the day it was decided to just go for it and put them pedal to the metal and see what this baby could do using all 10,000 lb of thrust from the engines the train managed to get up to a recorded speed of 183.0 mph now I say recorded because according to Dawn it managed to get up to 196 mph before the timing traps because of how light the train was it actually failed to trigger the sensors multiple times and the record is actually where it started to slow down after its top speed this would be the train speed record for North America that's still held today to put that in perspective the bright Line train in Florida has a top speed of 125 mph a far cry from the work done in 1966 so the whole plan worked the engineers cheered and the train was taken back to New York to much fanfare New York Central issued a big Public Announcement that the future had arrived and the public were invited to come and see it at the 60th Street yard the team then got down to business doing a case study for how this train would work how much to charge for passengers how it would work was scheduling and how it would be the future of the Railway the point had been proven that jet engines on trains worked and the track didn't have to even be modified and that a high-speed service could literally start tomorrow so what the hell happened there were two two major areas of concern the first was the flaw of the Prototype engine and the second was the business case simply put the m497 lacked any ability to go in reverse the jet engines could hardly be turned around to point the other way when it got to a shunted yard and not being able to move around like a typical train was a major design flaw the team believed that they could add buckets to the engines like the Boeing 727 does for reverse but that only doubles down on the next point that the jet engines on the roof were much too high the clearance of most of these lines especially in the tunnels when you got to Manhattan wouldn't allow the train to go many places at all so the engines would now need to be integrated inside of the train this in turn would remove space from the revenue generating passengers and cargo and create a major heating problem Oh yes whilst the heat was a huge major deal the jet engine's exhaust was another whole Factor entirely leaving a station the jet wash would destroy any platform and burn any passenger standing there and instead directing the heat upwards would just blow debris everywhere and lastly because of how much jet fuel cost economically this would be a Fu hungry beast and really not be that efficient at all especially at the low speeds of under 300 mph but it was argued that all of this could be fixed with a proper bespoke built jet train but the business case left a little bit more to be desired the issue actually was speed the train was too fast it would overtake existing freight services and other passenger trains and require double the signal distance it wasn't so much that track itself was a problem the tests proved that it was fine but rather the distance of the signals would need to be upgraded and believe it or not these weren't the main reasons why the project was cancelled it actually came down to a rival Railroad in 1968 only a year after all of this the New York Central merged with Pennsylvania Railroad the initial idea was to focus on high-speed travel between hubs was abandoned and it wasn't exactly because of logic Don himself in the source of this video said I wish the project had been received by Pennsylvania Railroad people as a true step forward rather than a matter to be derived unfortunately it was another case of the NIH not invented here syndrome the peny people hadn't been consulted about the project and therefore they resented it unfortunately the Pennsylvania Personnel always had trouble with the Central's technical research group and their work moreover the red team green teams competition probably was one of the major reasons for the downfall of the pen Central merger to this day there is still animosity between those that that live through the merger of those two railroads as for the Prototype it was stripped back to a normal rail car and put to work until being scrapped in 1984 the jet engines were put onto a new train project to create a snowblowing rail car which was quite the Beast and you have to wonder if you ever took a train from Grand Central to Albany from 1970 to 1977 you very well might have rode aboard the US record fastest train [Music] of course this wasn't the only high-profile future train in the USA back then there was also the GM aot train and trust me we're just getting started so make sure you subscribe if you want to see more videos just like this one this video would have not been possible without the Fantastic book written by Hank Morris and do Wetzel himself I want to thank these two Pioneers for the excellent and incredible stories that they put together for future Generations and I put a link down below to check out that book I wish more stories about crazy machines were so detailed and a special thank to the patreons who worked hard to make this video possible today and suggested it in the patreon group so if you want to suggest your own ideas then come to patreon with a link down in the description and send something my way thank you again so much for watching

Channel: Found And Explained

Views: 90,242

Keywords: aviation, news, documentry, history channel, flying, engineering, history, discovery, real engineering, mustard, wendover, airforce, soviet, usa military, cold war, ww2, world war 2 documentry

Id: 4h4lLYmFtgY

Length: 16min 55sec (1015 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2024