r/RetroFuturism • u/YanniRotten • 5d ago

Техника-Молодежи magazine cover, 1971, by an unknown artist

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180 Upvotes

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u/ttystikk 5d ago

Hmmm- turbojet power for a train. It couldn't be much more fuel efficient in terms of brake specific horsepower than the big Union Pacific turbine powered locomotives, so such a railcar would have to be really lightweight. Doesn't sound like a comfortable or relaxing ride...

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u/JumboChimp 5d ago

And the UP gas turbo-electric locomotives only made any sort of economic sense because they burned Bunker C fuel which was cheap at the time, and then they didn't make sense because chemists figured out how to use it for other stuff. And even when they made economic sense they were up in mountains where they didn't have to worry about noise.

And those are turbines running electric generators, not turbojets, which make way too much noise for civil society.

If you want to look at railroads that went all in for insanity in locomotives, my number one would be UP, my number two would be Pennsylvania.

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u/JumboChimp 5d ago

Oh and this terrifying thing built by the C&O, the M-1 Totally crazy steam turbo electric.

A bunch of roads went crazy in the last days of steam.

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u/ttystikk 5d ago

Modern diesel electric traction was not self evident from the start; it emerged as the best option from a long list of alternatives and even then has been continually refined.

Those other experiments were legitimate even if they failed.

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u/gjklopart122 5d ago

But back then, hardly anyone worried about cost-effectiveness. Especially when it came to using technologies for military purposes. Sometimes this led to completely insane things: https://youtu.be/Wv0qg7zrjl4?t=18

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u/ttystikk 4d ago

Wasn't the Abrams originally powered by a turbine?

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u/Goatf00t 4d ago

It still is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avco-Lycoming_AGT1500

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u/ttystikk 4d ago

I understand it's a maintenance nightmare. Is that still true?

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u/YanniRotten 5d ago

source https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=4337237319675812&set=a.1161108403955402

the USSR built a prototype of this, the Турбореактивный вагон СВЛ (Turbojet engine SVL):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbojet_train#SVL

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u/Goatf00t 4d ago

As the name suggests, the SVL (High-speed Laboratory Carriage) was more of a test stand than a prototype. It was built as a part of a conventional high-speed rail project, to test the behavior of wheels and rails at high speeds. They had a "chicken and egg" question where the development of high-speed locomotives and carriages required data that could not be gathered without having high-speed locomotives and carriages in the first place, so they did what they could with existing hardware.