I am Benjamin J. Temple. I am currently a student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, IL. I am looking for information on the Jet Train that Bombardier Transportation made back in 2002 with a locomotive powered by a Pratt & Whitney turboshaft engine. One prototype was built and tested, but no Jet Trains have yet been sold for service. I am looking for any information you can provide me with for this reason, I am looking to present this information to my professors to further investigate with possible experiments of turbine motors versus diesel motors. The purpose is to get accurate data on the power output of the two and compare advantages. Then see if there is ways of improving the turbine engine, if it has certain advantages over the diesel engine. Would you be willing to help me? I am also looking for any other information on any current turbine locomotives or future turbine locomotives project. Can any one please help me?
Well fuel economy for one is the main issue. LB for LB of fuel used at the speed and power outputs freight railroads and passenger trains run here in the USA your not going to beat the diesel engine offerings by either EMD or GE. A gas turbine at idle burns 80% of the fuel it does at full power. You are also going to need special tools to work on them training on how to work on them and the kicker again is the fuel usage. Read up on the Big Blows and Veranda’s turbine locomotives GE built for UP in the 60’s yes they had 8500 HP for the Big Blows and 4500 in the Veranda’s however they where LOUD full power they produced over 140 DB’s they drank fuel they had 16000 fuel tenders behind them for a run from Cheyenne to Salt Lake City and they would burn almost 1/3-1/2 of what they carried on a 6 hour run. Yes the turbine is great at producing power in a small package however look what is used to move the largest ships in the world diesel engines. A turbine might be 50-60% efficent the diesel engine is up to 80% efficent in how much of its fuel it turns into workable energy.
Mr. Temple:
One good place to start is W. H. Gregory “Decision Nears on Turbine Train Award”, Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 24, 1974. This article compares the United Aircraft TurboTrain with the Rohr Turboliner built under license from a French design.
Another place to look on this forum is to search for posts by Jerry Pier, who had worked on the Rohr Turboliners used by Amtrak. I haven’t seen his posts in a while, but you could e-mail him through this forum when you search for and bring up one of this posts.
The Jet Train was a prototype developed in response to a Federal Railway Administration initiative reqarding propulsion for higher speed trains. As far as I know, the initiative never got beyond that preliminary stage.
The turbine is advantageous when you need a lot of power in a small package such as for a fast passenger train as well as wanting to get high power in a single locomotive unit as with the Union Pacific turbine locomotives used for freight mentioned above. The turbine may have longer maintenance intervals – this is the case with turbine vs piston in aviation applications – although this can vary with circumstances. The massive direct-drive Diesels used in most ocean going freight ships must have good maintenance characteristics or they wouldn’t be usable in that application.
Modern turbines have excellent fuel economy, especially if they are run either at full power or switched off as they are in electric power utility applications and to a certain degree in modern non-nuclear navy ships. The problem as mentioned by the other replies to your post is that their part-load economy can be poor, although their are partial solutions to that problem.
The Aviation Week article suggested that the French Turboliner on which the Rohr Turboliners, operated the two turbines in a train, one in each power car at the ends of the train, in a special way. When maintaining s
Hello Shadow the Cats,
Thank you for responding here. I ask this and I mean no offense, but did you read my posting? The posting simple had a bit of information about the Jet Train and explaining why I needed this information.
The posting question was looking for any information on Turbine engines or motors that powered freight or passenger locomotives from the 2002 and forward even looking beyond into the future.
Now to address your comment here. Yes, I have books titled Turbines Westward by Thos. R. Lee, Big Blow… Union Pacific’s Super Turbines by Rev. Harold Keekley and Union Pacific’s Sherman Hill In the Diesel Era by A. J. Wolff. I have read these books and even studied them. The last book mainly has photos of the turbine locomotives, but as they say photos are worth a thousand words. I am fully aware of the General Electric’s GTEL 4500’s, GTEL 8500’s and some other locomotive that you have not mention here. I also have the G.E. GTEL 4500’s being the Big Blow, the Verandas and the GTEL 8500’s in HO scale.
Do you know of any sources of information such as magazine articles or literature reviews and where I can get them on the Jet Train or other turbine locomotive of the year 2002 and beyond?
The JetTrain was an attempt to combine the advantages of turbine and diesel power. The train would use a comparatively light diesel to power the train up to a point (35 MPH?) where the turbine would be economical, and it would be switched on and power the train up to high speeds. Unfortunately there was no market.
Wikipedia corroborates the part about using the Diesel for starting, switching over to the turbine for higher speeds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetTrain.
Turbines have long been advanced as a lightweight source for the high power required for fast trains in the absence of on overhead wire, but I guess the people interested in such trains have all electrified those routes.
Something you should know, although you may have to use the Wayback Machine and some ingenuity to find the sources that are still available, is the ALPS locomotive project, which used gas-turbine power to accelerate a substantial flywheel generator. (The “MegaGen” generator was developed by a team at the University of Texas as primary power for some of the proposed SDI weapons.) This was an interesting approach for a true HSR locomotive, and it was the platform from which Bombardier developed the JetTrain locomotive.
I downloaded a number of papers from the UT CEM site (you may have to navigate around a bit to find the links to the older papers under particular faculty names): http://www.cem.utexas.edu/ then select “Publications” from the title bar to get started).
Enhancing the ALPS design with some battery/supercapacitor storage is an interesting way to further equalize operation of the comparatively small gas turbines at a sensible continuous sfc for each. Also notice that the turbine shafts are vertical, limiting most of the effect of road shock to relatively robust bearings and shock-absorption systems.
Hello to all,
To all that responded to my posting, I want to thank you for your time and effort. Paul Milenkovic, I have seen your response and thank you. This material that you provide me seems like good stuff and I will look into it. I don’t know if it will help being my professor is looking for newer material, like in the 2000 time line or even newer like 2010.
RME, thank you for your response and for carefully reading my posting. I will use the knowledge that you have provide me with and see if it leads me into anything I need to conduct this research.
Here is what I found so far on this topic,
Bombardier fires up jet-powered locomotive
The JOURNAL of
You will likely get a better grade if you lean that:
A turboshaft engine is not a “jet”.
Although turbo jet engines use a turbine to turn the compressor, not all “jets” have either turbines or compressors.
A “jet” engine produces thrust by the reaction of the expelled exhaust. A turboshaft or combustion turbine produces torque from the action of the combustion gases on the turbine rotor.
A combustion turbine will not likely be a successful locomotive powerplant for the problem with fuel economy, even if all other problems are solved.
I hope he can find some of the actual engineering material and drawings, and that he will post back here with some of his intermediate research before he actually presents anything.
I hope he recognizes that the Pride of the Central was an experimental test vehicle, not intended as practical passenger transportation – although certainly an interesting successor to the Kruckenberg Schienenzeppelin. There’s enough material on Don Strack’s pages to give him a run at the UP turbines, and enough in Hirsimaki’s article on the coal-burning turbine boondoggle to get him up to speed on Hilsch tubes and other fun things. Perhaps the most ‘sensible’ turbines were the Rover adapted truck units used in the APT-E.
He’ll need a better differentiation of “jet” than the one provided: turboprop engines use part of the exhaust as ‘jet’ reaction propulsion, and turbofan engines develop a considerable part of their thrust through torque-induced fan rotation. However, I agree completely that it is wise to avoid the use of the word ‘jet’ outside of marketing materials or whiz-bang newsworking stories when discussing gas-turbine power for trains. (Note that the United Aircraft adaptation of Cripe’s train was never called a ‘jet’ train even though there seemed to be considerable similarities in a number of respects between the TurboTrain and contemporary UA aircraft.)
The so-called JetTrain was a remarkable cheapening of the ALPS locomotive, resembling to me the approach taken with the Turboliner III train (whose parts were sold off at fire-sale prices several years ago). Here you had a common gearbox with mechanical final drive, with the turbine and the diesel engine on different gearbox inputs (there was a clear Bombardier drawing that showed this, now of course long purged from the official sites and apparently also from the Wayback Machine courtesy of careful corporate robots.txt filing).
The ALPS locomotive
Any reaction to the exhaust of a turboshaft engine is negligible. If there were it would be a very inefficient engine. Indeed, look at the P&W PT6. The combustion gases travel from rear to front and then exhaust. The reactions would cancel each other. This is like the claim of thrust from the stub exhausts in some aircraft engines. There are those who claim so much thrust that, were it true, the aircraft could taxi without a propeller, but of course it can’t. The idea is to extract the energy from these gases in the turbine. There is waste energy in the heat of course but the velocity is not such that thrust would be useable.
The combustion turbine is only efficient at high loads. There is too much load variation to make it more than a novelty railroad wise. UP and GE could not make them practical even with the cheapest of fuels. Today those fuels are not readily available or in the case of coal, out of favor . A practical power plant will have to be very economical at low or no load and be powerful at full load. So far compression ignition engines are way ahead in these areas.
Here is a link to an interesting website with lots of info about Gas turbines in railroad applications: http://turbotrain.net/en/index.htm
The repetitive Chinglish in your links gives me some bad vibes.
That is strange. I thought it was a Japanese site.
And the site had some interesting and useful information.
Yes, I think this is an amateur (in the correct meaning of the word) site – look at the associated ‘turbo’ diesel train site linked from it for a much more graphic example.
The fact that they use a diagram of the ALPS locomotive in a discussion of the Bombardier JetTrain indicates to me that they don’t really recognize the change in the design between the two – which is very, very great. ALPS was explicitly designed around full HSR performance, which could only be said about JetTrain if you thought Turboliner IIIs had state-of-the-art powertrains. They also seem to have missed most if not all of the point of the MegaGen, assuming it is just about flywheel KERS.
I got the impression the site was written by college engineering students just getting into design analysis and the tools available for it; I think Professor Milenkovic could refine this down almost to year and curriculum levels. Their simulation package is pretty good for something originally designed to run on a 4MHz Z80 compatible with 24K BASIC ROM!
I was also a little amused by the four-speed tank transmission discussion – it would have been an interesting engineering problem to analyze forces and gear design in a mechanical transmission for railroad use, but I don’t think they are quite “there” in their engineering studies, or experience, just yet.
At least the JetTrain people understood there were advantages to using a positive-displacement engine at low to medium speed, and not just to hostle the locomotive and supply startup or hot-turning power to the turboshaft engine(s).
I think you are correct. A practicing engineer would have a lot more polish and substance.