After the end of World War II, the United States entered another period of economic development, from the wartime production of thousands of tanks, fighter jets are different, the development of the economy in the new environment must rely on the civilian market, of which the transportation field has undergone tremendous changes, automobile factories have produced a large number of cheap cars, plus a lot of wartime materials into the market, the civilian vehicle ownership rate soared, the problem is the decline in railway passenger traffic, railway passenger profits or even loss of money.
General Motors discovered the dilemma of rail transportation because the production of rail vehicles was also an important part of the company's business, so they decided to use technology to help the passenger transport company out of the predicament. Isn't there less passenger traffic on rail passengers? That means it doesn't make money to spend the same amount of money to maintain trains, so does making a batch of trains that are more economical and more efficient to operate reduce operating costs?
In 1955, General Motors successfully developed a passenger train called Aerotrain, which is a lightweight passenger train and has a more technological appearance, which is indeed more special at the time.
The train is powered by an EMD 567C 12-cylinder diesel engine that can produce 1200 horsepower, and there are two diesel engines on the car as auxiliary power, which are required for lighting, air conditioning, heating, etc. The locomotive is covered with an aerodynamic aluminum shell, and the hood, grille and other components of the locomotive refer to the car design.
Connected to the front are 10 specially developed economical, high-speed carriages, which are part of the Aerotrain, which is a bus body converted from General Motors, and the single carriage is only 40 feet (about 12.2 meters) long, which is half the length of the standard car. Usually a train is equipped with only a few cars, which can reduce the burden on the front of the train, and in general, there are not so many passengers, and increasing the number of carriages will only consume fuel.
According to calculations, Aerotrain is able to provide customers with passenger services and fares like ordinary buses, and the manufacturing and operating costs of trains are much lower than those of other railway passenger vehicles.
These advantages have indeed attracted the attention of many operators, such as the United Pacific Railway and the Pennsylvania Railway, which have used Aerotrain, and the performance of this train in actual operation is not good.
At the beginning of the test, the designers ignored an important problem, that is, as a passenger train comfort, there will be a huge noise in the cabin when running, and later solved this problem by modifying the body.
Compared with noise, the power defect is more fatal, 1200 horsepower is too weak for the train, even by shortening the carriage, using a lightweight aluminum body, the need for additional locomotives to pull on the mountain climb, which increases the cost of use.
And this special passenger train makes its maintenance also become a problem, the train structure is more complex, and it is not common with the maintenance system of other trains, but it increases the cost of use.
Instead of saving the declining U.S. passenger railroad, the Aerotrain itself ceased to be used in 1966 because it was not suitable, and only two trains remained as museum collections, which is also a rare railway vehicle.