The Turboliners were a family of gas turbine trainsets built for Amtrak in the 1970s. The first batch, known as RTG, were built by the French firm ANF and entered service on multiple routes in the Midwestern United States in 1973. The high cost of operating the trains led to their withdrawal from the Midwest in 1981. The last RTL trainsets left revenue service in 2003, with all but three being scrapped.
About Turboliner in brief
The Turboliners were a family of gas turbine trainsets built for Amtrak in the 1970s. They were among the first new equipment purchased by Amtrak to update its fleet with faster, more modern trains. The first batch, known as RTG, were built by the French firm ANF and entered service on multiple routes in the Midwestern United States in 1973. The high cost of operating the trains led to their withdrawal from the Midwest in 1981. The last RTL trainsets left revenue service in 2003, with all but three being scrapped. One RTG survives in a derelict state on a private property near Dugger, Indiana. The trains were powered by a pair of 1,140 horsepower Turbomeca Turmo III turbines. Each trainset consisted of two power cars, two coaches and a bargrill. The bargrill, located at the center of the trainset, had table seating for 24. The vestibules between the cars were partitioned by sliding doors: one at each end of the car, and a double set between the car themselves. A passenger moving between cars thus had to pull open three sets of doors, and there were no traps covering the steps down to platform level. Between 1985 and 1988, three RTG trainsets were rebuilt at the Beech Grove Shops for the Empire Corridor in New York. The rebuilt units were designated RTG-II and served out of Chicago, and initially the Chicago–St.
Louis corridor. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, New York and Amtrak partnered to rebuild the RTLs for high-speed service; this project failed. The RTG model was an Americanized version of the French ANF T 2000 RTG Turbotrain. The RTGs used European-style couplers between their cars, because they were built in France by ANF for French railways. The cars rode on Creusot-Loire trucks, and were based out of the Chicago, St. Louis, and Chicago–Chicago corridor. Amtrak leased two RTGs from ANF in 1973, at 85,000 USD per month per month. The UAC TurboTrain had been in revenue service in the United States and Canada since 1968, with mixed results. British Rail began testing the APT-E in 1972; for a variety of reasons, British Rail did not pursue gas turbine propulsion. Amtrak obtained a permanent waiver from the Federal Railroad Administration which exempted the RTG from the buff strength requirement of 800,000 pounds. the RTGs met a lower standard set by the International Union of Railways. The trains had top-mounted Nathan P1234A5 horns, a variation of the standard Nathan P5. Amtrak retained approximately 184 of the 440 trains which had run the day before.
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This page is based on the article Turboliner published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 11, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
