1962 UP Turbine with PA cab on NZ Auction Site

[mandealco]

Hi
Just saw this on our New Zealand auction site "Trade Me". I Don't know who built it, but it may be of interest to turbine fans.

I do know the vendor and have bought from him in years gone by.  Not sure if he'd ship overseas, but our exchange rate is favourable for US buyers.
https://www.trademe.co.nz/toys-models/models/railway/locomotives/listing-1986938751.htm?rsqid=335d4fc289944f759431479c892bec03
Cheers
Steve

[learmoia]

That appears very well done..

There are a few fudged items on the 2nd unit (trucks).. but very nice.

~Ian

[nscalbitz]

Yes he's obviously picked up an estate or is selling on behalf (SteveNPainting rings a bell).
d

[mandealco]

I did think of Steve as a likely builder, but his work is (usually) far more professional than this, but it is still nice work.

[OldEastRR]

Trump could make railroads use these again and bring back coal!!

[nkalanaga]

That looks like an oil tender, or did the UP cover their turbine coal bunkers, to keep the fine-ground coal from blowing away?

I think that's supposed to be the experimental coal-turbine, where they tried to do away with the steam portion.  If so, that middle unit should probably be bigger - it was a GN W-1 electric body.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_GTELs#Experimental_coal-burning_turbine

[up1950s]

Be interesting to see what it sell for .

[CRL]

Someone had to reach deep into the pile of shitthatdon’twork to come up with that project.

[drbnc]

May not be perfect, but it's a dang nice try.  Semi-foobie FTW?

[CHUCKGEO]

Quite a bit of work. No, not perfect, but I can imagine the hours the builder put into this.

[propmeup1]

I thought about making one of these. Was going to use a BLI PA and BLI centipede for the turbine unit with lots of machining plus not to forget it needs to been stretched. The drive trucks are sort of close but need work. I have a few extra big boy tenders I purchased 20 years ago.    What worries me is the poor running of both sets of centipedes I have. One set has been back four times, yes 4 and it still sucks. they other set has good days and bad, like stuttering around the layout.   Ironiclly they run just a well as the full size ones did, pennsy crews hated them.  After all the money I dumped into them , well, I almost hate them too.

[nkalanaga]

The Centipede would be a viable option, as the wheel arrangement is the same as the GN's W1.  The trucks probably aren't the same, but it would be much closer than anything else available.

Is the poor running due to the motor, or poor pickup?  If the latter, you might find they'll work as turbines.  Wire all three together, and the PA and tender should be enough to keep the Centipede alive.

[brokemoto]

I liked my centipedes, but, the one thing that I hated about the "smart" decoder was that when it hit a dead spot, it stopped the whole thing while it re-set.  It used to re-set, then start to run, again, but, this was annoying.  I do not use DCC.  Mine ran well, unless they broke contact. 

I did talk to several DCC haters who took out the whole business then re-wired.  This eliminated the stop-while-re-set problem, but, it also eliminated the sound, which,  I must admit, I liked, at least on the centipedes, I did.  I was on the brink of removing the decoders, though, when I decided that I was trying to do  too much with too many railroads on an average sized layout, so I sold off all of my Penn power, cabooses and passenger cars (except for a few baggage cars).

Other than the stop-while-re-setting, I did have a problem with one of the units (I bought one single with the antenna and one without).  It came with one of the solder joints undone at the truck.  As I am clumsy with a soldering iron near plastic, I sent it back (BLI did give me "permission" to address the problem, myself, but, I am clumsy with a soldering iron near plastic).  They did fix it, but, they took their sweet time about it.  When I finally did get it back, it was allright, except, of course, for the previously mentioned stall-while-re-setting problem.

As I was running these on DC, I do not know that "keep-alive" would work.  One other thing for DC users to note on these is that you could not run them  in pairs, as Penn did, as your power supply does not put out enough voltage to run two of these with decoders.  You can run them in pairs if you take out the decoder, but, if you do that, you lose the sound.

[propmeup1]

Both sets have pickup issues mainly over the Peco turnouts. Atlas isn't too bad. I built the layout using Peco because they have #8 vs. Atlas has #6. I've replace many Peco turnouts with Atlas #6 so the Cents run better over them.     However they do for what reason don't know, just decide to stop and restart even on a straight area of clean track.  You would think with 16 drive wheels on the track at least no less then 4 per truck are hitting the rail.

    I would be very happy if BLI would use the same method that Kato used on the FEF 4-8-4. The engine is the pick up and runs great, I mean really great. Never stalls and pulls like there is no tomorrow.     My best running BLI are the M1 both A & B, I have five and they are great runners. The T1 is so-so. The diesels, again, so-so.


Back on topic, I may still make one of the turbines.  Was going to barrow an O scale to do the drawings and down size every detail.

[Boilerman]

I believe that there was only one of these built by the UP back in the 90's, it was a prototype experiment when UP was thinking of going back to using coal as a fuel ( I have the article saved some place).
Correct me if I am wrong.