Impractical Locomotion For Train

May be amusing to you but if you really think about it NYC was actually the first High speed train here in the U.S. and it actually worked. I'm not sure what the problem was that they didn't do it unless it was a concern of railroad/automobile crossings. NYC had some ingenious ideas for there time. 

The jet wash from the two jet engines atop the NYC unit are a safety concern. Sucking-in debris will damage the turbine blades and there was no blade containment in the event those blades fail. The short maintenance intervals and the relatively short service life of jet engines makes them too costly to operate. Fuel consumption would be very high.

The only practical power sources for railroads have been steam, diesel and electric which includes magnetic levitation.

    I remember reading that Al Perlman wanted to show that you did not need the $500 Million grant the Pennsylvania got from the feds for the Metroliner Project to have high-speed rail. He felt that the grant was merely a government bail-out. He gave the Central's lab in Cleveland a $30,000.00 budget to prove his point.

Bobby Ogage posted:

 Another impractical application of aviation power to railroading is the use of jet engines to melt snow and blow away debris from roadbeds.

This is not impractical at all and is used all the time.

It's easy to pass judgment on past experiments with hindsight.

Experimentation is the road to new innovations.

https://sites.google.com/site/rohraerotrain/

https://youtu.be/PcY6WW8nOHw?t=36

Nice old video,wish it had sound.

Doug

It looks like something Wilie E would have purchased from ACME!

trnluvr posted:

Nice old video,wish it had sound.

Doug

The video brings up an interesting point: the still-standing North American rail speed record was made on conventional jointed rail - not CWR !

Which leads me to wonder if the maximum speed achieved was limited by the instrumentation readings regarding vehicle stability, rather than power limitations. But the following item suggests that 180mph was their target, anyhow.

Wonder how true this part is:

http://www.gereports.com/post/...-wetzel-talks-about/

TK: Where did you run it?

DW: We took the train to a straight stretch of track west of Toledo, Ohio. It was conventional track and roadbed. There was only a small section that was welded. On my second run our speed reached 196 mph and we were decelerating when we went through the timing traps. They told me that they wanted the train to run through at 180 mph. Everybody thought that it was quite funny that we set a world record while decelerating. We were going 183.35 mph when got through the gate.

TK: Were you scared at any time?

DW: No, but the crew told me that once or twice it seemed that the M-497 was airborne. It failed to close the track circuit and the track-occupied light turned off at the dispatcher’s office at the Toledo train station. It made them anxious. I knew that we weren’t actually airborne, we just didn’t complete the track circuit due to the M-497′s light weight.

I remember reading another comment somewhere that the RDC seemed airborne on some grade crossing bumps, and that overall it was a somewhat reckless stunt.