I saw this at the transportation museum in St. Louis a few years ago. Just found the pix and scanned them in. Looks like a cross between a 57 Chevy and a B52.
Looks like Virgil Exner designed it. Very cool, I hope they're restoring it. I think I've seen pictures of it before.
Thats the GM "Aerotrain"...use to run in the late 50's. General Motors EMD division is still the worlds largest manufacturer of locomotives.
There's been some interesting locomotives come down the pike over the years. Can't remember the name of it or the railroad it ran on, Burlington rings a bell and I believe Zephyr was the name of their streamlined loco. It was the most beautiful streamliner on the east side of the country. California had the most beautiful paint schemes on their streamliners and matching passenger cars. Granted, me bein' a California boy I'm a touch prejudiced, but we saw these almost every day in our wandering up and down the town and out along the coast where we could race them in our Shoebox coupes. The Southern Pacific Daylight Streamliner. An HO model, but it illustrates pretty well. Pasenger cars were painted to match and the multi-hued paint scheme of black, red and orange from one end of the train to the other seen up against the green hills of California was quite a sight. This loco is the same one as the colorful streamliner seen above. It was in service during the war and they're known as "War Babies." In the early stages of WW2 the powers that be decided the colorful Daylight Streamliner would be too easy for Japanese planes to see and decreed they would be painted black. If I remember right, the passenger cars were mostly black with a little bit of dark green trim above and below the windows. No pic, but the freight engines most commonly seen was the cab-forward Mallets. Strange looking they were, but a sensible answer to running the many tunnels of the Sierra and getting the crew out of the smoke since it now exhausted to the rear of the engine. If you find a photo of one of these, you'll see a deck like area between tender and rear of the loco. Called the Monkey Deck, it looked to many hobos like a good place to ride, but you could be scalded by the steam and hot water washdown that hit the deck at times. Some hobos were badly injured and many died. Along those same lines, depending on how the engine was performing some of them were asphxiated by the smoke from the rear mounted stack. The western part of the US was about the only place the cab-forward design was used. Along those same lines, quite a few other countries designed and developed a cab-forward, but none of them on such a massive scale as the 4-8-8-4 Southern Pacific loco. These things used to haul freight through Ventura, California and coming down from Santa Barbara they'd be touching on 70+. We lived about a hundred feet from the tracks and when they went through town at 0300 in the morning you'd swear the end of the world was nigh....
That museum is full of cool stuff like that. If you're lucky, they'll run the Chrysler Turbine car while your there.
If they restore it, we should start a movement to have them include a chopped top, airbags, Lancer hubcaps, and a flake job! (I can see where the idea for the '60 Chevy truck hood came from!)
The Mallet. That 'stream liner' is about the coolest train I have ever seen. But then again I dont spend any time looking for them either!
Those big old steam locomotives are just the most amazing pieces of metal machinery. Imagine the tools and labor it took to make one, or even service one back in the day. 800 tons in some cases and moving at 80-100mph towing a train? If you're in the area, take in Steamtown in Scranton,PA.
Ah yes Steamtown. Great museum. I had an uncle that put in 45 years starting with the DL&W, later on E-L and finally became Conrail. We were pretty close and he passed on a lot of railroading stories. He was an engineer and by the time I was old enough to see him at work he was running commuter trains out of Hoboken. I spent a LOT of time up on the diesels with him, riding home on his last train of the day. What a cool job! -Scott
nice... they got a cool train museum in pomona too, at the faigrounds where they have the swapmeet. no streamliners though.
Unfortunately, the Aerotrain was a bit of a bust- don't remember the problem, but it didn't last long at all. Ryan had a great post on this If you like nice lines, check out the GG1- ran on the Pennsy lines for years (they finally took them off the line because they ran out of parts) and was designed by Raymond Loewy (53 Studebaker as well). Other good looking streamliners would include the Burlington Zephyr, the Flying Yankee (built by Budd), the Hiawatha, the Commodore Vanderbilt, the Reading Crusader, the... well you get the picture (can you tell I'm a train guy?)...
The Allegheny Locomotive in the Henry Ford Museum is really something to see in person too. It's one of the heaviest and most powerful steam locomotives ever built. Almost 8000hp at full steam! The one in the Henry was driven there under it's own power and parked.
Search YouTube for videos of the SP Daylight Streamliner as well as the Cab-Forwards. The sounds alone are worth the trouble. An earlier version of the cab forward was a 4-6-6-4 and quite similar to the 4-8-8-4 seen above. We heard these every day - and a few nights - when I was a kid. Sometimes we'd take our 22's or BB - Red Ryder - guns and hike the hills above Ventura. If you were on the ocean side of the ridge you could hear the trains coming for a long way off. We'd be near the "V", a big white letter denoting Ventura and like you'd see on the hillsides of various towns who used their own letters. You could hear them coming from way up the coast, probably starting out near the south end of the oil fields about 4-5 miles out of Ventura. Kinda cool it was to eat lunch, look at the islands, the freighters passing by, fishing boats at sea and hear a big ol' Malley slidin' down the coast at speeds which made you wonder if they could stop before they hit LA....
Lots of railroads engaged well know industrial designers to dress up Locomotives. This was prevelant as the railroads sorted out the dieselization of their loco rosters. Raymond Lowey was associated with the Pennsylvania RR and did the GG1 Electrics and hung some sheet metal on some of their larger passenger steam engines. Below are the ones I saw in person as a kid on the New York Central, hauling the 20Th Century Limited NY to Chicago upscale passenger trains. These were Hudson Locomotives. bottom on eis the lowey designed Pennsy compound engine. The GM Aero train was basically under powered, and limited to two or three propriety style coaches. Not very fast and not very economical per passenger mile, and limited to shorter flat inter city runs rather than long distance cross country trecks.
Interesting that the Mallets for all their industrial sounding tool moniker, were actually a development of a French design for a articulated compound engine. Named for the fellow who developed the dual driver sections which pivoted under the boiler. His mane was pronounced Mallay, not Mallet like the hammer.
Hmm, I'm starting to understand why people are into old trains so much. Those things are incredible! Shit. Im a train nerd.
Nothing says "the '30's" more than that last posted locomotive. Awesome stuff. I've got a bunch of H0-scale modeltrains aswell, but most all of them are German locomotives.
I think those Hudsons were the ones I read about that had a long straight run next to a big lake. In winter, they'd be clicking off some serious speeds - 112 mph or so from what I understand and the big iceboats would race them. Musta been something to see, talk about your wind chill factor. Iceboats - fwiw - can go 5-6 times the speed of the wind. Locos? How much track ya got seemed to be their main limitation. One small but interesting fact about steam locos nowadays, China still builds them because their country has so much coal. In the Andes, the location of the world's highest railroad I believe, they use diesels until they get to an altitude where the diesels can't cut it and a steam loco is connected to pull the train to the top of the line. Cool part about steam is, full torque available at zero rpm....
that train is awesome. I love the influence...as said already, you can see the lineage for the '60/'61 Chevy truck hoods, but that wrap-around windshield and forward-sloping A-pillar is also evident in the '60-'63 Chevy trucks. The A-pillar angle and wrap around can also bee seen in '54-'58 Buicks and Oldsmobiles and '58 Chevy cars, to name a few. I'd love to see a restored '60 Long Bed or Suburban parked in front of that train. -Brad
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