CN had locomotives known as hellkittens, What were these locomotives? Gary
Some railfans, or in this case one specific railfan from Saskatchewan like to come up with their own nicknames for locomotives.
I'm not aware of this nickname ever being used by anyone who actually worked for CN.
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
IA and eastern CN had locomotives known as hellkittens, What were these locomotives? Gary
Known by whom? Is it a dopey railfan inventing this stuff or is it really you? Please stop your silly quiz show.
Rick
rixflix aka Captain Video. Blessed be Jean Shepherd and all His works!!! Hooray for 1939, the all time movie year!!! I took that ride on the Reading but my Baby caught the Katy and left me a mule to ride.
Made by Grumman?
https://pueblorailway.org/roster/rocket-cars/the-grumman/
That's out of a remake of The Rocketeer with the Cirrus X-3 worn by Perry the Platypus.
And I still think it's a ripoff of the French Aerotrain.
Overmod That's out of a remake of The Rocketeer with the Cirrus X-3 worn by Perry the Platypus. And I still think it's a ripoff of the French Aerotrain.
The Bertin Aerotrain sat over an inverted "T" rail, while the Grumman design sits in a "U" shaped track. I think both these variations are still proposed for maglev vehicles.
The etymology of "hellkitten" suggests a diminutive of "hellcat".
I can see the link to the US Navy F6F in the post above, but I doubt that it is the OP's intended vehicle.
Assuming we are talking about a locomotive, it would seem to need to be a smaller version of something that earned the name "hellcat", possibly between 1943 and 1945....?
Peter
This? Never heard of such a term for any CN unit......IN any circle..
I was thinking of the Rohr car, which was upon further reflection actually licensed from the French.
If I recall correctly this involved something like 2MW of power at 4000V, made quite a bit of noise, and at one point was getting a then-trendy external-combustion powerplant (for pollution abatement). I did not care for the TACV "trains" (or the Garrett, which wound up being the logical follow-on to the NYC jet RDC, and was not particularly suited to scaling up to actual train size either).
Here's something that may be of interest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6JUascc_JE&t=4s
Thinking further about the diminutive aspect suggested by "Hellkitten", I remembered some Whitcomb design units built by CLC for CN in 1948. These were thought so little of by CN that they were returned to CLC before half of the order was delivered. Most of them were sold by Whitcomb to the Rock Island. These were CN 7803 to 7820 and Rock Island 1000 to 1016.
These weighed 75 tons, looked pretty much like a standard GE single engine 70 ton unit and had an inline 8 cylinder Sterling engine.
So they were not popular, small and didn't last long. Sounds like a good candidate for the name "hellkitten".
Strangely, the Dutch Railways bought a hundred or so of these built under licence to smaller clearances, and they stayed in service into the 21st century...
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