The following ad recently appeared in Progressive Railroading
ROHR TURBOLINERS FOR SALE
Amtrak has available for sale seven (7) trainsets of Rohr Turboliners (Direct Drive Gas Turbines) and associated spare parts inventory. Each trainset consists of a combination power and coach at each end and three intermediate coaches, one with a food service facility. Three (3) trainsets have been overhauled and are stored in Delaware; four (4) trainsets are in various stages of overhaul and are stored in New York. Contact information provided below for interested parties:
I have seen a Turboliner in a junk yard in south central Indiana. I’m not sure of the town but it can be seen on the north side of the highway and is still painted in what looks like its original colors. Spare parts?
They have to be over thirty years old by now and I suspect Rohr isn’t supplying parts at this point in time. I rode one on a day excursion from Chicago to Milwaukee and back with my sonabout thirty years ago. We opted to wait an extra half hour in Milwaukee for the Empire Builder to ride on a Superliner car. The Rohr was a very smooth comfortable ride with lots of interior room and huge windows compared to normal cars. With all that light coming in they were quite bright inside. One of the few Amtrak trips I have had that I enjoyed. East of Chicago it gets pretty bad until you get to the corridor
There were some differences between the French imports and the Rohr Americanized versions. The most notable was the nose. The Rohr trainsets has a sleek, tapered nose where the French imports had a more bulbous affair.
The other notable difference was the car body width. The Rohr trainsets had a full 10’ wide carbody, the French trainsets were only about 9’ wide.
In 1973,Amtrak bought six 5 car RTG Trains from ANF Industires of France. These trains were to SNCF Specs in all respects except the paint job and TiteLoc couplers at each end to permit towing. They were powered by two 1140 hp dual shaft gas turbines that propelled the trains to a maximum speed of 125 mph. The cars were only 9’-5" wide as opposed the US 10’ and standards such as buff strength were below the FRA requirement of 800,000 lbs. However, since the loaded weight was under 300 tons, they were permitted to run on a waiver. The RTG’s went into service in the Chicago-St Louis Corridor. (In later years, two of the RTG’s were renovated by Amtrak including replacement of the RTG nose with an RTL nose. The renovation was not particularly effective and the trains were finally scrapped.) Customer response was so enthusiastic that in the fall of 1973 Amtrak placed an order for 7 trains (with an option for 7 more) with Rohr Industires specifying an Americanized version meeting all FRA requirements. The first train was delivered in June of 1976 with the balance of the order completed on Christmas eve of the same year. The Rohr (RTL) Trains were bought to run in the Northeast Corridor but before delivery started, a deal was made with New York State to run them in the Empire Corridor instead. It was rumored that the change was made out of fear that the RTL’s would be so successful that electrification could never be sold for the Boston-New Haven segment.
The RTL’s ran in the Albany-NYC corridor until 1995. During this time they continued to be very popular with the riding public but Amtrak chose to standardize on diesel electric power in non-electrified corridors and they were retired. However New York State wanted the service contined and in 1996, the New York State Department of Transportation, in the interests of improving high-speed rail in the state, entered an agreement with Amtrak where
One question: I had heard thru the grapevine that the carbody structure was quite rusty and that was part of the reason for the rebuild taking so long. Any truth in that?
Hey NCDOT, there are your train sets for the Asheville to Salisbury S line, and for the eastern NC to Wilmington runs. I would sure like to see those run in front of my house in Old Fort, NC!
What was the hourly fuel consumption for the TM1600 at full throttle? I wondered about this for a long time.
Incidently, the Turbos also ran to Detroit and Milwaukee. I recall discussion about adding a sixth car from another set to increase capacity; but I never witnessed such a consist around Chicago.
Illinois didn’t take a serious look at 125-mph service between Chicago and Saint Louis until around 1990, well after the Turbos were gone. I no longer have a copy of the study for IDOT, but around $350 million was estimated for flawed and politically doomed grade separation and crossing elimination proposals. Even if the rail passenger office was filled with politically connected and Springfield residents with little planning or rail experience, a national consulting firm was employed.
I liked the RTG’s, having ridden them in the US and later in France. Ironically, my ride in France was in the scenic hills/mountains of Central France between Bordeaux and Lyon and speed was only around 40 mph.
Hundreds of people came to the Bloomington station to see the innaugural run, and there was similar excitement at other stops. Publicity and buzz like that is hard to come by now.
The Bordeaux - Lyon line was interesting for its manual block signaling with counter-weighted cables and pulleys rather than steel rods and cranks to set turnouts and signals.
This rumor was completely false although it was repeated by some SuperSteel people, possibly as an excuse. ANF, which built the car bodies, used a labor intensive procedure to accomplish a ripple-free surface from welded steel sheets. After the car body structure was completed, the side wall were flattened by using a powerful electro-magnet on the outside pulling against an armature on the inside. The armature had numeous holes, 2 or 3 inches in diameter in it. heat was applied with a torch through these hole holes, relieving residual stresses left from the welding process and shrinking the metal. After this process was completed, the car body was sandblasted and a heavy layer of a “Bondo”-like material sprayed on. This was then troweled flat in a manner similar to that used in plastering. The standard for flatness was that a a gap of no more than 1 millimeter could not be exceeded over the length of a 3 meter bar positioned anywhere on the car side.
I strongly advised SuperSteel to avoid sand blasting all of this material off and rather to do a spot repair. They ignored this recommendation. When the torch spots occuring in the original straightening process showed up, they had no idea what it was they were seeing and started the rumor. In fact, the sandblasting process revealed very little rust, all of which could have been handled with spot repairs. Since they lacked the expertise to repeat the French process, cemented plastic panels below the windows were substitued and autobody repair people were hired to do the Bondo thing between the windows. The end product does not look bad but its durability has yet to be tested.
The TM1200 has a BSFC of 0.494 at its full power of 1542 HP. This works out to be about 109 gallons per hour based on 7 lbs/gal for diesel 2. Two TM1200’s total 2288 lbs while a 3000 hp diesel will weigh more than 40,000. The weight saving compensates somewhat for the higher fuel consumption compared to a diesel and the turbine’s exhaust emissions are far lower.
Incidently, I was on thet inaugural RTG run to St Louis representing Rohr Industries
Sounds to me like these would have been just the ticket for the NYP-AC service the casinos have contracted with NJT for (provided there’s still 3rd rail in the Hudson River tunnel.), or even NC’s Piedmonts.
Thanks once again to Jerry for contributing all of the info on something many of us are interested in. The description of the novel manufacturing process is something I had not heard about, and it indicates that ANF was developing a technique to get long life that did not require stainless steel.
The BSFC 0f .494 is not out of line of what they used to get with Diesels, but Diesels have been a “moving target” and have improved over the years as Don Oltmann indicated. The big problem with turbines is what they use at part load. In the railroad application where you have station dwell time, less-than-full-speed running, cruise power that is much lower than acceleration power, you are operating the turbines at far from optimal fuel consumption.
I read in Aviation Week that the Turboliners idled one of the turbines and cruised on the second turbine – apparently this saved some fuel over running both turbines at half load.
As I recall, an E8 burned 114 g/h and a turbo-charged F40 130 g/h. At the time, 109 gph compared favorably, even if less efficient at lower power settings.
The question now is what are current fuel consumption ratings for diesels and gas-turbines? An implicit attack on rail transportation is the potential for raising automobile fuel efficiency. It’s important to speak up for parallel improvement and potential in the rail sector.
A gas turbine comprising a compressor section, a combustor and a power section delivers its best fuel consumption at full power which is fine for airplanes and helicopters but not so good for locomotives, particularly those in commuter service where the majority of time is spent in notch 6 or about 50% power. This problem can be alleviated by adding a recuperator to the turbine. To do this, the turbine case is separated at the compressor stage outlet and the compressed air is conducted to a counter flow heat exchanger, where heat is transferred from the exhaust, returned to the combustor and on to the power turbine section. Because it has gained energy in this process, less fuel is required to produce the required power, resulting in an improved BSFC number. This works for all power levels below full power. The price of adding this feature is increased weight and space, which is important on aircraft but not so much on a locomotive.
One of the examples of a recuperated gas turbine is the 1500 hp AGT1500 that powers the Abrams Tank. Gas turbine power was selected to help hold the weight of the tank at a level that would permit air transport as well as for its ability to go from a cold start to full power in 90 seconds. In this example the recuperator surrounds the engine. The space available limited the recuperator’s effectiveness but the results are quite good, producing a BSFC of 0.513 at 50% power, only 32% above the full power number of 0.386. In 2002, I presented a paper (#02-3249) at the transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting titled “Diesel Locomotive Retrofit Conceptual Design” wherein I proposed the use of two AGT1500’s in parallel to replace the 3000 hp diesel in a commuter locomotive. At that time zero hours rebuilt AGT1500’s were available at less than half the cost of a new engines making the proposal economically feasible. (With the heavy usage of the Abrams Tank in Kuwait and Iraq,
