While we are all familiar with the Cold War Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union to develop a superior rocket ship, another race once raged to construct the fastest jet-powered equipment on the ground: a turbo train.
Don Wetzel, an engineer with the New York Central Railroad, was tasked in the 1960s with making locomotives quicker and cheaper without sacrificing safety. The Federal Railway Administration was given funding to build high-speed trains to transport people and freight under the High-Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965.
Wetzel’s concept was to equip the train with jet engines, allowing it to be pushed by jet force rather than the power of a gas turbine or coal-powered locomotive. Wetzel discovered that jet engines functioned better at greater speeds when refitting the engine car and applied his discovery to passenger train engines before modifying the engines that hauled goods.
The M-497 Black Beetle, completed in 1966, was Wetzel’s first effort at a high-speed train. He changed the front of a Budd Rail Diesel Car to give it a sleeker, more contemporary appearance. He also obtained two recycled General Electric J47-19 5,000 horsepower jet engines from the United States Air Force for $5,000.
Abandoned soviet era jet train. pic.twitter.com/hLxKQ1kmvT
Originally, the jet engines were supposed to be at the back of the automobile, but Wetzel’s wife, who designed the bodywork, shifted them to the front for aesthetic reasons. It was tested on tracks that ran from Butler, Indiana, to Stryker, Ohio, a 28-mile stretch of straight and flat track. The train attained a record-breaking speed of 183 miles per hour, which has yet to be surpassed.
Soon after, two Pratt & Whitney J52 jet engines were placed on the Linear Induction Motor Research Vehicle manufactured by Garrett AiResearch, a pioneering aerospace technology corporation and California-based developer of turbochargers and turboprop engines.
The competitive attitude is thought to have inspired the USSR to develop their own turbo train, first to speed up the daily travel from Omsk to Tomsk, a distance of over 550 miles. The Soviets had previously done a lot of study on high-speed trains. The earliest trials were conducted in the 1930s.
In 1970, Russian train builders in Saint Petersburg’s Kalininsky district redesigned and modernized the chassis of one of their ER22 head engines to look more streamlined, and added two turbojet engines from a Yakovlev YAK-40 on the top of the front car, similar to the model used in the United States. It weighed 5.4 tons when fully filled with jet fuel and was 92 feet long. The first test was carried out in 1971 on the route connecting the train terminus in Golutvin, southeast of Moscow.
The objective was to bring the train up to roughly 225 miles per hour, but it only got to 116 miles per hour at first. The engineers allegedly reached 155 miles per hour after straining the engine to its limits. It is believed that the train’s designers intended for it to be part of the “Russian Troika Express.”
However, the train proved to be too loud and expensive to run. Many passengers were terrified of traveling at such high speeds since any flaw in the rails may result in a devastating disaster if the train crashed.
The project was canceled, and the modified ER22 was the only model converted. The train engine was abandoned in a disused section of track behind a rail car plant in Doroshikha. As it rusts away in the weeds, others want the locomotive rebuilt and placed in a museum, or sold to a private collector who can care for it.