Gas Turbine/CODAG/CODOG trains?

My unhealthy obession with trains continues, fortunately I only like fast trains so I can lie to myself in order to sleep at night that it's just an extension of my like for big, fast machines.

Apparently gas turbine trains were running in the US and Canada in 1972 at over 100mph. These died out a handful of years before Britains Intercity 125 introduced 200km/h running without massive investment in electrification and dedicated tracks. Could developed gas turbine trains do for Nrth America what diesels did for Britain?
 
IIRC they used obscene amounts of petrol, and so were killed by the oil shock. Not sure how to eliminate that, though.
 
Gas turbines use a similar amount of fuel at top speed and at idle so waste fuel at low speeds. That they use more fuel than a diesel at high speed it moot because diesels get too big and heavy to be practical much above 200km/h.
 
The Union Pacific railroad used 55 gas turbine freight locos known as the "Big Blows" which ran on a cheap heavy oil called Bunker C. They burnt more fuel than an equivalent diesel but bunker C oil was cheap in fact it was almost given away by the oil refineries because apart from marine fuel use it was almost a waste product. What killed off the Big Blows was the petro chemical industry started to use Bunker C for producing fertiliser so the demand rocketed. The price more than quadrupled in 10 years and the advantage the turbine had was lost.

I believe that there were plans for the Intercity 125 HST replacement to be turbo powered but the usual price of fuel problem killed off the idea and it will be diesel powered.
 

Markus

Banned
Gas turbines use a similar amount of fuel at top speed and at idle so waste fuel at low speeds. That they use more fuel than a diesel at high speed it moot because diesels get too big and heavy to be practical much above 200km/h.

If you want to go faster than 125mph/200kph you most likely need new tracks and such an investment will only be made if one is certain of heavy traffic on the line. In that case electrification is the way to go. For trains in the 100 to 125mph range diesels are just fine.
 
It appears to me that the gas turbine train could find a niche because of it's light engine weight and bulk engine power which allows it to reach high speeds on existing tracks. This is vital because a lot of countries will not build dedicated tracks with electrification costing billions.

This is what I'd consider to be the end point, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetTrain, a train which can so 150mph+ without the massive infrastructure overhead cost. Can we get there from the 60s turbine trains?
 
The first French TGV unit was gas turbine driven. However the oil crisis arrived just as the test runs were finished, and the French decided to switch to the electrical propulsion, in tune to the nuclear power program that now supplies 80% of the French electricity.
Electrification is a minor cost factor compared to new track that becomes necessary for high-speed runs. You cannot take an old battered line, put a fast train on it and expect high speeds... at least not for more than a few minutes. A fast train puts a huge lot of mechanical stress on the track, which needs to be engineered to withstand this stress.
 
My unhealthy obession with trains continues, fortunately I only like fast trains so I can lie to myself in order to sleep at night that it's just an extension of my like for big, fast machines.

Apparently gas turbine trains were running in the US and Canada in 1972 at over 100mph. These died out a handful of years before Britains Intercity 125 introduced 200km/h running without massive investment in electrification and dedicated tracks. Could developed gas turbine trains do for Nrth America what diesels did for Britain?
IIRC one of the things that killed off the Canadian Turbos was that they couldn't take winter weather.
 
French gas turbine trains ran from 1971 until 2005 in large numbers, the US versions from 1973 until the mid 1990s with one going to 2002. The US Turboliners were the subject a rebuild programme to give New York State a 125mph train service as recently as 2000, but sadly this ended in a political/legal wrangle. The Canadian UAC Turbo trains ran from 1968 to 1984, apparently maintaining 97% service reliability, and the AMTRAK ones going from 1968 to 1976. So technically the concept is sound.

Apparently GT trains aren't as hard on rails and railbeds as diesels because of their vastly lighter engines, so a track which can take a 100mph diesel can take a GT at higher speeds.
 
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