BRYAN, OHIO, CEREMONY TO MARK U.S. RAIL SPEED RECORD
Never mind the 150-mph Acela trains Amtrak started running between Boston and Washington three years ago. The United States train speed record still resides on an arrow-straight, 30-mile stretch of track across Williams County. During a ceremony this morning [ Nov.14], rail historians will dedicate an Ohio Historic Marker at the train station here, about 70 miles west of Toledo, that will commemorate a July 23, 1966, test run in which New York Central railcar M-497, temporarily equipped with twin jet engines on its roof, set an official mark of 183.85 mph. According to the train's test engineer, it actually went a bit faster than that.
"I had it up to 196," engineer Don Wetzel, who plans to attend today's ceremony, said this week from his eastern Ohio home. But the railroad's president, Alfred Perlman, was sitting next to him and told him to slow down before reaching the official timing point, and he followed the big boss's order. Mr. Wetzel, a New York Central brakeman and relief engineer who had been a military aircraft mechanic during World War II, was hand-picked to oversee the M-497's conversion from an ordinary Budd Rail Diesel Car to a jet train 30 days before the test, then assigned to the controls. Railroad police lined the tracks to protect the curious.
"I opened the throttles and hung on," Mr. Wetzel said. "They later gave me the whistle cord because I never let go of it. I was looking down the track, but there wasn't much I could have done if something was on the track. We hit a piece of plywood some kids had left and turned it to splinters."
During its first run under jet propulsion, the train reached 140 mph, the engineer recalled. So the decision was made to see what it could do during the second test trip. "We were supposed to go for the world record the next day," Mr. Wetzel recalled, "but then they told us they had gotten two very sophisticated reports from the first day's tests and didn't need any more data, so it was canceled. "If I had known they were going to do that, I might have gone for the record on Saturday," despite Mr. Perlman's instructions, he said.
At the time, the world record was just over 200 mph, Mr. Wetzel said. Today, French high-speed trains run daily service at 186 mph and the French tested a train at 300 mph. But during the ensuing 37 years, no U.S. train has topped the M-497's mark, and it does not seem likely to happen anytime soon. The Amtrak Acela, which reached 169 mph in preservice tests on the Boston-Washington corridor, tops out at 150 mph but reaches that speed during regular trips only on some short sections of track. At the time, New York Central said its test was a first look at possible high-speed shuttle train service on routes between major cities about 200 miles apart. Six months later, the railroad applied for federal permission to cancel all its longer-distance passenger trains, which it said no longer could compete with autos and airliners. But after the test, the M-497's jet equipment and test monitoring devices were removed, its diesel engines were reconnected, and it returned to its workaday task of shuttling commuters between New York City and Albany, N.Y. The car was retired 11 years later and is believed to have been scrapped some years after that.
Mr. Wetzel blamed the abandonment of New York Central's high speed experiment on corporate in-fighting that arose two years later after the company merged with its bitter rival, the Pennsylvania Railroad, to form Penn Central. But he conceded that many of the same factors that thwart high-speed rail today were in play four decades ago. Officials noted at the time that 180-mph jet trains would have to share track with freights running 50 mph or slower, and many miles of extra track would have needed to be built to keep the faster trains moving. That problem persists today, with passenger trains confined to 79 mph on most tracks outside the Northeast Corridor, upstate New York, and a test section in southwest Michigan that has few freight trains. Then there was the risk of collisions at the grade-crossings that line most railroad tracks in this country -- at 180 mph, such crashes would have severe consequences for the trains as well as for errant motorists.
The super-fast trains in countries such as France and Japan run mainly on separate tracks that have no road crossings or conflicting freight trains. But the United States has not built such railways. "We have cheap gasoline," Mr. Wetzel said. "You just can't beat that...." [Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, 11-14-03, from article appearing in The Toledo Blade]