you remember this
Atomic train.
I saw those words while flipping through The Journal Gazette's film files and I just had to stop and pull the envelope out.
Inside was a single film negative with what looked like something out of a retro sci-fi flick trying to predict what the future was going to look like. It turns out, that's kind of what the train was.
According to stories in The Journal Gazette on July 23 and 24, 1966, the train was a jet-powered experiment of the New York Central Railroad which tested its speed on a stretch of track between Butler and Bryan, Ohio.
At the time, the Wall Street Journal said the New York Central was considering ways to set up quick shuttle services between cities less than 200 miles apart.
The train – really a single converted club car with engineers in the back and room for passengers in the front – had a slanted nose and two Air Force jet engines on top. The car was said to resemble a black beetle, which became its nickname.
In tests July 23, the Black Beetle traveled down a stretch of the track as a plane believed to be carrying railroad executives circled low above the route.
Though the tests were meant to be kept quiet, hundreds of residents showed up along the test route to see the train zip by, be towed back to the starting point and then zip by again. Guards blocked crossings and kept traffic off bridges over the tracks.
In an interview posted in 2014 on General Electric's website, railroad engineer and former military pilot Don Wetzel, who operated the car during its tests, gave details about the project.
GE made the 5,000-horsepower Air Force jet engines that were purchased on the surplus market and attached to a 13-year-old Budd “Beeliner” Rail Diesel Car. Wetzel's wife was a commercial artist who created the streamlined design for the car, which had the designation M-497.
The peak speed of the July 23 tests was recorded at 183.68 mph, though Wetzel says in the interview that the car had actually gone faster and was timed while decelerating.
The Black Beetle never left the experimental phase. According to Wetzel's interview, the jet engines were removed and the car was refurbished and put into regular service until 1984.
As it turns out, there was nothing atomic about the train – its engines had been converted from jet to diesel fuel. But its futuristic, sci-fi look no doubt inspired some hyperbole on the part of whomever typed up the label in our archive decades ago.
Whatever fuel was used, this piece of area history was worth stopping to find out more about.
