The LWT12s are SW1200s at heart. Many of the SW1200s are hitting the end of their service lives, and it might be easy to acquire the machinery of one being scrapped.
If what I've read is true, even though those preserved Aerotrains are empty shells, the locomotives anyway, it probably wouldn't be too tough to restore them to operation. Under those futuristic exteriors was a 1200 horsepower switcher geared for high speed running, nothing special. Should be plenty of switcher parts laying around.
Be that as it may, its still part of railroad history. If a group or groups want to save it, what's the issue ?
I'd hardly call the Aerotrain a design classic, although I will concede its futuristic appearance. Consider that the coaches were modified GMC intercity bus bodies, the headlight assembly was originally for Euclid mining trucks, etc., etc., etc. It looks more like a quick response from GM to Train X and Talgo in the 1950's.
And they look so so cool.
Have fun with your trains
I visited the St Louis, MO Transportation Museum in July of 2008, this is what their example of the Aero-Train looked like then, I have no idea what condition it is in today.
Doug
May your flanges always stay BETWEEN the rails
For those who would like to see or ride behind an operating Aero-Train, you just need to make the trip to Portland, OR, Our Zoo has an OPERATING 5/8 Scale (30" Gauge) replica of the Aero-Train. The passenger cars didn't scale out as well as the locomotive, but really, with the Aero-Train, who is looking at the CARS?
Posted by chutton01 on Friday, April 03, 2015 4:50 PM I realize this is a revived thread, but it is (or was, at least) possible to create a bus-based passenger railcar which has served reasonably well, if not luxuriously, for decades - the BR Pacers from the 1980s
I realize this is a revived thread, but it is (or was, at least) possible to create a bus-based passenger railcar which has served reasonably well, if not luxuriously, for decades - the BR Pacers from the 1980s
And updated by the British TV show 'Top Gear'
Low cost to the max!
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
It is absolutely necessary to preserve what we can about the rich history of railroading around the world. Aerotrains were certainly noteworthy because they are part of the evolution of rail transportation. The influences that led to their production and the reasons for their ultimate demise tell a story about the times people lived in and the choices they made.
We are fortunate to have such great examples of digital pictures and videos as seen in this thread. This is becoming one of the only ways to enjoy things from the past such as Aerotrains. There is something lacking in the digital realm though–the satisfaction from experiencing or touching something real and tangible.
Future generations rely on us to preserve phyisical specimens of the world around us just as we relied on our predecesors to do the same. We stand to lose a real connection to our past if we allow complacency to guide our decisions.
As per the Aero-train in St. Louis:
Engine and traction motors were removed by RI RR before donation.
Somewhere around 2002-2004 a cosmetic restoration was done on the whole train. A very good job was done; however it was then moved to the lower lot of the museum, and is now "rail-locked" A crane would be needed to move it back up to a mainline connection.
Unfortuantly, this move has also left it open to the elements, and is starting to show it.
An interview during the restoration in 2003:
The movement to the lower lot.
What the Aerotrain Looks like now:
At least she's been saved, and who knows what may happen from here? Only time will tell.
-S. Connor
The t 1 never pulled an areotrain. I think the question concerning the t 1 was if it was a successful design, some say yes and some say no. Its a mute point, by the time the t 1 was maturing, steam was dead on prr and disappearing quick every else.
As for the aerotrain, why not save one, sucessfull or not. An interesting concept, that was tried on a few roads. We have lost so much railroad history, including all the t 1's all of NYC Hudson's, why the areo train too.
Was a PRR T-1 used to haul the Aerotrain?
Pete_SRCGM employed air suspension in an attempt to give the AeroTrain a 'floating' ride that was cutting edge technology of its day. Now however, with the more recent advances from GM's engineering dept., they have develpoed a computer-controlled 'smart' magnetic suspension system that has proven itself to work well as currently used in the auto/truck industry. I firmly believe that by installing this newer type of suspension in each passenger car and renewing the engine's powerplant and cab with more modern components, this historic/futuristic train would definalely merit refurbishment of its interiors to become one of America's premier excursion trains of the 21st century!
I think you may be looking at the wrong things to improve.
There is little problem with the air suspension itself. As you note, the use of magnetorheological damping is the 'right' answer to vertical ride quality, and I suspect to lateral motion and associated ride-motion quality issues as well. I don't think it would be difficult either to scale up the technology or apply it without significantly impairing the 'historical integrity' of the existing equipment (you might have to weld a few clevis or other contact points).
There is no reason to 'replace' the original engine type, except perhaps for a easier-maintained version of the 567 crankcase (and perhaps using the adapted 645 power-assembly approach). There is no reason to chase Tier 4 final with a historic train, the likely cost of a repower with something like a Cummins QSK is several orders of magnitude above any fuel or maintenance savings you might observe, and the parts and know-how to keep a 567 running well are easily available. I would certainly think about transplanting a compatible alternator and rectification system in ... but that's not really rocket science and I suspect that appropriate parts might be cheap to acquire (e.g., from one of LT&E's switchers?)
I am not sure whether the existing Flexicoil truck at the front is ideal for modern use, but I doubt you're going to be running the train at speeds where its 'issues' with stability or perturbing forces would become significant. It might be interesting to look at what would be involved in transplanting a modern low-unsprung-mass truck (like the type on a Genesis locomotive), but again this would be a labor of love, not that mother we call necessity.
The real problem I see is that comparatively few people are going to like the 'nostalgia' associated with the cut-rate Fifties world of spartan lightweight accommodations. Associated with this is the relatively severe restriction on available seats associated with the lightweight power and limited number of cars (similar to the experience with so many of the lightweight trains of the '30s which had to be replaced with full-size consists and larger locomotives when they became successful). Is there really a practical and sustainable business model for operating the Aerotrain long-term?
(Personally, I would hope so.)
Paul Milenkovic Why preserve/restore the Aerotrain? One could argue that all of the 1950's "lightweight experimentals" (Pennsy-Budd Tubular, Budd Pioneer III, Talgo, Train-X, Aerotrain) were failures (do we include the Alan Cripe TurboTrain in with that group -- it was derived from a design back in the 1950's for the C&O but never built). On the other hand, the lightweight experimentals were a generation after the switch to what are generally called lightweight streamline passenger cars (conventional 4-axle 85-foot stainless steel or Corten steel cars that supplanted the "heavyweight" steel cars around the time of the Diesel transition). When the lightweight experimentals came out, passenger rail was already in serious decline and the failure to work out the bugs in the lightweight experimentals is connected to the fact that they were supposed to be a magic cure for declining passenger revenues when their innovative designs would have needed more fine tuning and passenger service needed more than simply a new train design. The GM Aerotrain was more of a failure than the others. Talgo and Train-X had some measure of technical sophistication in their guided axle mechanisms. Aerotrain was simply putting GM bus bodies on unsteered single-axle trucks and was fantastically bad from what I have heard. Talgo, Train-X, TurboTrain may have been rough riding compared to say, some six-axle heavyweight cars with sophisticated swing-hanger trucks that represent the gold standard of smooth ride, but it all depends on your sensibilities and expectations. Aerotrain, from what I gather, was a naive design that had a critical speed below that of mainline passenger operations, and it shook so bad as to be dangerous at speed. I have ridden TurboTrain, and while people nit pick about "lightweight trains" and how bad they are on crossover and switch frogs, at speed and on welded rail, it ran quite smoothly, which is not anything you can say about Aerotrain. A lot of motives are assigned to GM, wanting to favor cars and buses over trains, and so on. But what I think happened is that some engineers thought, a bus runs on two axles (actually 3 axles for the big motor coaches), a two-axle bus runs smoothly enough over a highway, why don't we put two steel axles on a widened bus and hook a bunch together and make a smooth-running train? There is a lot that is said to be different about trains than highway, and one of the widely held beliefs is that trains need to be heavy to ride well, a belief that I don't share as demonstrated by European trains, which are all lightweight by U.S. standards. On the other hand, a railroad car needs to take into account the pecularity of rail-wheel guidance, and the suspension requirements for a stable train are very different from a stable highway vehicle. In fact, the stability of trains at high speeds was put on a scientific basis by work in Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. starting in the 1960's. The guided axle designs have the potential for high speed as demonstrated by the modern Talgos; the Aerotrain was proven to be a particularly bad design from the standpoint of highspeed running. If I were to select a lightweight experimental for preservation or restoration, my pick would be the NYC XPlorerer (the Train-X). Is there one still moldering away in that weeded siding somewhere in the Carolinas? The reason to pick Train-X is that Talgo is still in service while Aerotrain was a naive design without future potential. As to Train-X, many regard it as an antecedant to TurboTrain, and while TurboTrain was not a raging success, it was an inspiration to many about the possiblities of modern lightweight trains (see the Midwest Highspeed Rail Association Web page for their take on TurboTrain). I have also heard rumors that the Train-X equipment was used during the development and testing of TurboTrain. As to my nomination of Train-X, it was in part the brainchild of Robert Young, not the actor but the railroad exec who headed C&O and later NYC, and who had the failed dream of revamping declining passenger service using lightweight trains with lower fuel and motive power costs. It is also said that Train-X was to antecedant to TurboTrain, but the patent trail suggests it is more complex than that. Alan Cripe held patents from the early 1950's at C&O for a "paper train" that looks an awful lot like TurboTrain, complete with clamshell doors at the ends for connecting these unit trains in multiple. The Train-X patents ("Axle guiding mechanism" and others) are assigned to Pullman Standard and do not involve Alan Cripe, and their axle guiding mechanisms are different from either the C&O train or the later TurboTrain. The Train-X, however, uses a similar four-bar linkage remote roll center pendulum tilt as TurboTrain, not found on Talgo. Based on a combination of the history of Robert Young, the ill-starred dreamer of restoring passengeer trains who took his own life, probably owing to mental depression illness, the indirect connection to Alan Cripe, perhaps one of the more creative railroad car designers, the sophistication of both the pendulum tilt and the guided-axle systems, my vote on preservation and/or restoration goes to Train-X, if this is still possible, rather than bothering with Aerotrain.
Why preserve/restore the Aerotrain?
One could argue that all of the 1950's "lightweight experimentals" (Pennsy-Budd Tubular, Budd Pioneer III, Talgo, Train-X, Aerotrain) were failures (do we include the Alan Cripe TurboTrain in with that group -- it was derived from a design back in the 1950's for the C&O but never built). On the other hand, the lightweight experimentals were a generation after the switch to what are generally called lightweight streamline passenger cars (conventional 4-axle 85-foot stainless steel or Corten steel cars that supplanted the "heavyweight" steel cars around the time of the Diesel transition). When the lightweight experimentals came out, passenger rail was already in serious decline and the failure to work out the bugs in the lightweight experimentals is connected to the fact that they were supposed to be a magic cure for declining passenger revenues when their innovative designs would have needed more fine tuning and passenger service needed more than simply a new train design.
The GM Aerotrain was more of a failure than the others. Talgo and Train-X had some measure of technical sophistication in their guided axle mechanisms. Aerotrain was simply putting GM bus bodies on unsteered single-axle trucks and was fantastically bad from what I have heard. Talgo, Train-X, TurboTrain may have been rough riding compared to say, some six-axle heavyweight cars with sophisticated swing-hanger trucks that represent the gold standard of smooth ride, but it all depends on your sensibilities and expectations. Aerotrain, from what I gather, was a naive design that had a critical speed below that of mainline passenger operations, and it shook so bad as to be dangerous at speed. I have ridden TurboTrain, and while people nit pick about "lightweight trains" and how bad they are on crossover and switch frogs, at speed and on welded rail, it ran quite smoothly, which is not anything you can say about Aerotrain.
A lot of motives are assigned to GM, wanting to favor cars and buses over trains, and so on. But what I think happened is that some engineers thought, a bus runs on two axles (actually 3 axles for the big motor coaches), a two-axle bus runs smoothly enough over a highway, why don't we put two steel axles on a widened bus and hook a bunch together and make a smooth-running train? There is a lot that is said to be different about trains than highway, and one of the widely held beliefs is that trains need to be heavy to ride well, a belief that I don't share as demonstrated by European trains, which are all lightweight by U.S. standards. On the other hand, a railroad car needs to take into account the pecularity of rail-wheel guidance, and the suspension requirements for a stable train are very different from a stable highway vehicle.
In fact, the stability of trains at high speeds was put on a scientific basis by work in Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. starting in the 1960's. The guided axle designs have the potential for high speed as demonstrated by the modern Talgos; the Aerotrain was proven to be a particularly bad design from the standpoint of highspeed running.
If I were to select a lightweight experimental for preservation or restoration, my pick would be the NYC XPlorerer (the Train-X). Is there one still moldering away in that weeded siding somewhere in the Carolinas? The reason to pick Train-X is that Talgo is still in service while Aerotrain was a naive design without future potential. As to Train-X, many regard it as an antecedant to TurboTrain, and while TurboTrain was not a raging success, it was an inspiration to many about the possiblities of modern lightweight trains (see the Midwest Highspeed Rail Association Web page for their take on TurboTrain). I have also heard rumors that the Train-X equipment was used during the development and testing of TurboTrain.
As to my nomination of Train-X, it was in part the brainchild of Robert Young, not the actor but the railroad exec who headed C&O and later NYC, and who had the failed dream of revamping declining passenger service using lightweight trains with lower fuel and motive power costs. It is also said that Train-X was to antecedant to TurboTrain, but the patent trail suggests it is more complex than that. Alan Cripe held patents from the early 1950's at C&O for a "paper train" that looks an awful lot like TurboTrain, complete with clamshell doors at the ends for connecting these unit trains in multiple. The Train-X patents ("Axle guiding mechanism" and others) are assigned to Pullman Standard and do not involve Alan Cripe, and their axle guiding mechanisms are different from either the C&O train or the later TurboTrain. The Train-X, however, uses a similar four-bar linkage remote roll center pendulum tilt as TurboTrain, not found on Talgo.
Based on a combination of the history of Robert Young, the ill-starred dreamer of restoring passengeer trains who took his own life, probably owing to mental depression illness, the indirect connection to Alan Cripe, perhaps one of the more creative railroad car designers, the sophistication of both the pendulum tilt and the guided-axle systems, my vote on preservation and/or restoration goes to Train-X, if this is still possible, rather than bothering with Aerotrain.
Since you've read Neil Burnell's article in The Keystone, you've seen some of very best of recent research on the T1.
If you want to read the text of the C&O test of the PRR T1's (there were two) here's the link:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3943/is_200505/ai_n13642634
It's a bit hard to understand without the graphics but the story is clear enough. I understand there will be a Part 2 published later this year or early next. Single back issues are available from C&OHS if you want the whole picture.
The N&W tests of 5511 were published by N&WHS in the Nov/Dec 2006 issue of The Arrow. Unfortunately, the text is not available on the internet nor can the Arrow be purchased as a single issue (yet, this may change). See NWHS site (nwhs.org) for cover photo and some information about the article.
feltonhill wrote: In capable hands, the T1 wasn't all that slippery starting, either. The engineer just had to remember it wasn't a K4.When tested on C&O and N&W there were no complaints about slipping. In fact on C&O there were many comments (in correspondence that is still very much available) about the T1's not slipping under difficult circumstances. Of course, C&O had to fix the sanders on both T1's before testing. Seems that PRR didn't have them aimed at the rail heads. This is straight from the daily test reports written by the PRR engineman assigned to the tests. Glad you brought up the mileage in a positive light. This is a long standing myth. At first, the top T1's were matching the E7's monthly mileage, about 10,000 to 11,000. This comes directly from the monthly mileage reports tht PRR kept and some still survive. However, someone made the remark that the best one only managed something like 2,800 miles early on. Of course, that's what made print, but it was unsubstantiated hearsay. Hard evidence says otherwise.However, whether they were really what PRR needed.....well, that's subject to considerable debate. I'm afraid I'm in the camp that considers them not the best possible choice for PRR's operating conditions.The thing to remember is this - all recent research indicates that the T1 wasn't nearly as useless as we've been led to believe for almost 50 years. They pretty much took what was handed them and got the trains over the road. This is based on PRR memos, test reports from PRR, C&O and N&W, interviews with the crews that operated them, letters between C&O, N&W and PRR. Primary source stuff, first person commentaries. A lot of this has appeared in magazines published by PRRT&HS (many articles), C&OHS (one so far) and N&WHS (one). There's more on the way at PRR and C&O. Keep an eye on the magazines from these two groups.
In capable hands, the T1 wasn't all that slippery starting, either. The engineer just had to remember it wasn't a K4.
When tested on C&O and N&W there were no complaints about slipping. In fact on C&O there were many comments (in correspondence that is still very much available) about the T1's not slipping under difficult circumstances. Of course, C&O had to fix the sanders on both T1's before testing. Seems that PRR didn't have them aimed at the rail heads. This is straight from the daily test reports written by the PRR engineman assigned to the tests.
Glad you brought up the mileage in a positive light. This is a long standing myth. At first, the top T1's were matching the E7's monthly mileage, about 10,000 to 11,000. This comes directly from the monthly mileage reports tht PRR kept and some still survive. However, someone made the remark that the best one only managed something like 2,800 miles early on. Of course, that's what made print, but it was unsubstantiated hearsay. Hard evidence says otherwise.
However, whether they were really what PRR needed.....well, that's subject to considerable debate. I'm afraid I'm in the camp that considers them not the best possible choice for PRR's operating conditions.
The thing to remember is this - all recent research indicates that the T1 wasn't nearly as useless as we've been led to believe for almost 50 years. They pretty much took what was handed them and got the trains over the road. This is based on PRR memos, test reports from PRR, C&O and N&W, interviews with the crews that operated them, letters between C&O, N&W and PRR. Primary source stuff, first person commentaries. A lot of this has appeared in magazines published by PRRT&HS (many articles), C&OHS (one so far) and N&WHS (one). There's more on the way at PRR and C&O. Keep an eye on the magazines from these two groups.
as far as what "camp" we are in......did any RR realy need a new steam locomotive after say..1940(the FT came out)....take the Niagara....introduced 1945.....by 1950 they were bumped off most long distance trains...and most of my info in my post came from PRRT&HS articles
tomikawaTT wrote: With 50 built, the PRR T1 was far more numerous than the N&W J class, but nowhere near as good. If Pennsy had followed their usual practice of exhaustive prototype testing, the T1s would have been one-off experimentals like the S1 and S2.Chuck
With 50 built, the PRR T1 was far more numerous than the N&W J class, but nowhere near as good. If Pennsy had followed their usual practice of exhaustive prototype testing, the T1s would have been one-off experimentals like the S1 and S2.
Chuck
WHAT.....no where as good???!!!???.....the only thing ive been able to find negitive on the T1 was it was "slippery" to start with a heavy train......they racked up service mileage comparible to diesels of the time ( mileage between required service/repairs) they were more effiecent then a "modern" 4-8-4....had a higher TE higher drawbar HP.....and they did do testing on the T1..2 years worth i believe..the S's were nothing more then to much of a good thing..and if you include the Q class....why would they build 26 "failures"...please dont get me wrong in thinkin that i dont like the N&W's J's they like most N&W locomotives were true thoroughbreds.....but to insinuate that anything the Standard Railroad of the World did was subpar.....well.....thems fightin words
csmith9474 wrote: "Why preserve/restore the Aerotrain?"That is an easy question to answer. Regardless of success or failure, it is still a part of railroading history. Many folks find interest in the Aerotrain. Somebody's interest in the Aerotrain is why this thread exists. Just because you don't find something from railroading's past particularly interesting or a failure, doesn't mean it shouldn't be bothered with.
"Why preserve/restore the Aerotrain?"
That is an easy question to answer. Regardless of success or failure, it is still a part of railroading history. Many folks find interest in the Aerotrain. Somebody's interest in the Aerotrain is why this thread exists. Just because you don't find something from railroading's past particularly interesting or a failure, doesn't mean it shouldn't be bothered with.
the same could be said to those that dont think 19th century railroading is interesting or worthy of discussion.....if it wasnt for the primeval railroads of the 1830's and 40's we would be talking about the newest canal barge on the Erie canal
After trying to buy a copy of Geoffry Doughty "New York Central and the Trains of the Future", I found that I could read/borrow a copy for the State Historical Society Library on campus -- they also have a complete set of back issues of Trains Magazine. I also found that the Wendt Engineering Library has back issues of Railway Locomotives and Cars and Volume 130 covering 1956 has all kinds of info about the Train-X (NYC XPlorer) and there may be information on Aerotrain if I were to dig.
I have always wondered about the bad-riding rep for the lightweight experimentals, including Aerotrain. The standard narrative was "Yep, those lightweight trains were all failures -- railroads thought their jet-age styling could win back passengers but they rode rough and chased passengers away." I guess I dissed Aerotrain based on the non-guided long-wheelbase two-axle design; Doughty says they were the roughest-riding of the bunch and they had bad "laterals", I guess bad side sway, that fits with my conjecture that the design wasn't stable above a critical speed, although Doughty said that XPlorer had some rough ride characteristics that were worst for the end cars and especially for the trailing car at the far end from the locomotive.
On the other hand, Doughty shows a picture of the Aerotrain suspension, showing not only the air springs but shock absorbers placed in the vertical and horizontal axes. Damping can cover for a multitude of sins from the standpoint of suspension design and perhaps the Aerotrain wasn't that bad after all. Dampers or shock absorbers are things that can wear out; perhaps the bad rep for Aerotrain was maintenance when they let the shocks go bad.
Doughty also attributes the bad ride of Train-X/XPlorer to design compromises made to Alan Cripe's original Train-X test car. The test car is kind of cute -- the consist was a locomotive, some kind of business car, a streamlined Aerotrain-like 2-axle transition car made from a caboose, and the bob-tailed Train-X prototype car, hanging in semi-trailer fashion from the transition car. The book is not very technical and some details may be lost in the translation. But I gather from the patent database references that the end axles of a Train-X consist were locked out of steering, and this may have given the ends of the Train-X similar tracking problems to the Aerotrain.
The Talgo of that era (Rock Island used one Aerotrain loco with GM bus-body cars; another Aerotrain loco pulled a Talgo; B&M and New Haven each had a Talgo consist with the FM Speed Merchant loco at each end) was a 3-unit string with 2 end axles and 2 intermediate axles. The modern Talgo steers the end axles with link work off the steering angle of the adjoining intermediate axle; perhaps the 1956 Talgo lacked this arrangement and again had similar tracking problems to Aerotrain. Anyway, Talgo was 3-unit strings that were about 110 feet long that were coupled in multiples to form trains.
Perhaps the sad thing about the lightweight experimentals as they came on the tail end of the private-railroad passenger era in America. The first batch of experimentals -- Pioneer Zephyr, Green Diamond, City of Salinas, etc - were lightweight fixed-consist articulateds of the 1930s that led to the standard "lightweight streamliner" of the 40's, 50's, and the Amtrak Heritage fleet. The second batch of experimentals -- Aerotrain, Train-X, and Talgo -- didn't lead to anything because passenger trains were dying owing to historical forces that a quick technological fix couldn't remedy, but they stand out in people's mind as a slap-dash response to the passenger crisis from railroad management (or perhaps style-over-function GM) that didn't have their hearts in it. The third batch experimentals -- Metroliner and TurboTrain -- were funded by the government as part of the Pell Plan to jump start private railroad passenger trains through technology, only this time done by the USDOT instead of Robert Youngs NYC. I guess the TurboTrain hasn't led to anything (yet) although the Metroliner, also plagued with a multitude of small problems, and in my opinion it rode rough, or a least rougher than the guided-axle TurboTrain, led to the AEM-7/Amfleet combination that has been the workhorse of the NEC.
Rough riding is also a subjective thing; people will put up with some rough riding in terminal areas. Have you experienced the ground-mode of the Bombardier Regional Jet. Once you are in the air it is OK (although the cabin seems confining compared to a 737 owing to the curved sides and low ceilings -- again, a lightweight experimental train effect), but on taxi, you feel every last bump on the cement.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
1. I think preservation of any rare part of railroading's history (or any American history) is worthwhile. And diversity of interests is also worthwhile.
2. I think it is great that Talgos operate in the NW, makes Amtrak and NA passenger trains less of a cookey cutter situation. My own experience is that Talgos are OK, not great but OK.
3. I rode the NH Turbotrain plenty of times between Boston and both GCT and later (underPC) Penn Station. I'ds say in general it was a success. Passengers generally liked it. It did draw a limited number of passengers down from the sky, It played its small part in th e funding of the electrification to Boston and the Acela program.
Aerotrain was a classic example of GM "Autothink," use enough style and maybe nobody will notice that the mechanicals suck. It was mechanically problematical and rode like a Radio Flyer wagon, but it sure was pretty!
To answer a question, N&W J #611 and A #1218 are at the Virginia State Railroad Museum in Roanoke, under cover and in cosmetically nice condition. Due to the unavailability of repair parts they will never run again (unless somebody tools up to manufacture such things as Baker valve gear parts and non-standard staybolts.)
OTOH, I don't know if any of the 400+ NYC J's have been preserved (the NYC 4-6-4 Hudson was class J with various suffixes.)
At the risk of being shoed over to the Model Railroader side, I have looked at those sites regarding model Aerotrains, and one of them has a large collection of prototype photos.
Looking at one of the HO models, it seems that the models will follow the prototype in having fixed, unguided axles. I took one of my Electrotren HO Talgo models and uncoupled a string of cars so that there was an unguided axle at the end. On the 42 foot wheelbase, that end axle is in a pronounced slide on 18" radius track, and also prone to derailment with the NWSL RP-25 wheels I have retrofitted. Unsteered axles don't work on long wheelbases, whether in HO or 12" to the foot scale. I wonder if a lot of modelers will buy the Aerotrain because it is cool and then these things will sit in boxes on the shelf because like the prototype, they won't run well.
I was reading an account on the Web (I believe it was a NH historical society page) about the Dan'l Webster (or Daniel Webster) train. In its later days, the New Haven was run (or some say run into the ground - did he spend some time in the Big House for his efforts?) by a fellow named McGinnis who was doing a lot of the experimenting with lighweight trains.
Apparently there were three such trains named after historical New Englanders: Daniel Webster (the Baldwin Diesel-hydraulic powered Train-X), John Quincy Adams (the FM lighweight Diesel-electric powered Talgo), and Roger Williams (the Budd RDC Hot Rod -- those Budd RDC cars with the altered roof lines and the locomotive-style cabs at the A ends).
Apart from their exotic nature (although the RDC Hot Rod was pretty much a restyled RDC of which hundreds were built), they were all troublesome, but perhaps not for the reason you would think. There is this matter about needing electric power to enter Grand Central Terminal; the 3rd rail shoe dual-mode capability on all three trains were afterthoughts and led to serious breakdowns.
It is sometimes hard to get accounts from people about any and all of these trains apart from "they rode rough", "they were junk", "they were failures." For example, there is a modern Talgo in Pacific Cascades service, and many people ride it and seem to like it, but there is a vocal contingent complaining that guided-axle is worthless and that those train ride rough. One account of this is that over the southerly part of that route the trains ride smoothly, but over the Seattle-Vancouver section, the tracks are in bad shape and that anything would ride rough over that segment.
There are comments to the effect that the NYC Train-X called XPlorer was called "XPloder" by the crew. In the NH article about the Danial Webster Train-X, it was remarked that the cab crew experienced a very rough ride, others have attributed to the very long wheelbase "power truck" of the Diesel-hydraulic engine-transmission package on the Baldwin locomotive.
Another attribute of Train-X is that the patents indicate that they locked out the axle steering on the end axles of the train. That too could contribute stability problems. The TurboTrain solved the axle at the end of the train issue by putting conventional two-axle trucks at the ends under the domes; Talgo originally had a scheme for steering the end axle at the locomotive end with a special drawbar. The current Talgo steers the end axles with a link arrangement to extrapolate the last between-car axle alignment, and they also use a shorter wheelbase on the end cars to reduce the extrapolation error. I have modified the Electrotren HO models with that kind of end-axle steering, and it works well if you have a curve with a good easement, but running such equipment through crossovers has the end axle being shoved in non-tangent directions.
In fairness to the Aerotrain, all of the lighweight experimentals were naive designs in that the preceded the engineering research done in the 1960's to put stability of guided vehicles on a scientific basis. Perhaps the two-axle Aerotrain car could be made stable with the right give in the journal boxes and hydraulic shock absorbers located in the right places - the current generation Talgo has a raft of shock absorbers in almost every axis in the articulated connection between train cars.
The railroad industry along with the electric power utility industry tend to be very conservative and skeptical of any innovation or novel engineering solutions. As a result, passenger trains in the U.S. are changed very little from the early 1950's while autos and airplanes have undergone remarkable improvements in fuel efficiency. This skepticism of anything new bleeds over into the foamer community and the passenger rail advocacy community.
Perhaps I am guilty of the same thing to pile on to Aerotrain, but of all of the lighweight experimentals, Aerotrain is probably foremost in the public consciousness because of GM's publicity tours and marketing efforts while the other lighweight experimentals weren't even heard of, and the design faults of Aerotrain tars the entire effort with the same brush.
DMUinCT wrote:At least you can buy a scale model of it. MTH has made one in "O" gauge (Lionel size).
I believe it was Bowser that produced them in HO. I think that Con Cor is also going to release one in HO.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.