The aero-train was an attempt by the railroads to attract more passengers back from the Airlines. if you look at the engine, you'll see a distinct non-coincidence design that is very much what Airplanes looked like during the same timeframe. In essence they were trying to say that this train would be as fast or faster than an airplane (although ti never was), they never advertised it this way, but using the term Areo and the appaerance of looking like an airplane, was intentially to give this impression.
In actually, it may look ugly now, but back them it was state of the art beautiful, and if it had ran smooth and was fast, it would have been a great train. unfortunaly, as others have stated, it operated very badely. of course, if the designers had designed all new passenger cars as well, then it would have probably been a great sucess.
And it was not the only strange looking train from the time, there were others as well. It was a very fluidic moment for deisels as they tried to come up with ways to compete with each other (most deisel manufactuers were new, as most steam manufactuer's hadn't made the switch yet) and, in the passenger market, the newly blooming airline business.
Jay