Nostalgia & History > The Experiment That Died, UP 10002

I've been doing some research about when Union Pacific started using its Gothic lettering, which in turn has resulted in several updates to the information I've found about UP's Streamliners.

http://utahrails.net/up/up-gothic-lettering.php

While looking at some of the dispositions of the Streamliner cars, I recalled that I never really did find out more about the story that M-10002, the first City of Los Angeles, was sold to Northrop-Hendy in California, supposedly for gas turbine development.

After spending a couple hours with various online searches, I found that the Northrop-Hendy Company was an equal joint company owned by Northrop Aircraft Company and Joshua Hendy Company. There's a whole story about both the history of Northrop, and the history of Hendy, but the combination was formed to pursue Hendy's development of a turboprop aircraft engine. The initial use was to be for an upgrade to the B35 bomber aircraft proposed by Northrop.

In 1948, Northrop-Hendy was spun off as the Turbodyne Corporation to continue development of its 10,000 HP XT-37 turboprop engine. In 1950, General Electric bought the patents, name, and technical data of Turbodyne, and continued the development of the company's turboprop aircraft engine, although the engine itself was still in development and had not yet seen any field testing.

Back to 1947. Union Pacific's William "Bull" Jeffers was the president of the railroad and was looking for a modern equivalent of the single unit high horsepower that the company had seen in its 6,000 HP Big Boy steam locomotive. He first tried buying a pair of Baldwin's "Centipede" monsters, but the order was cancelled in April 1947 because 18 months after the order was placed, Baldwin had not yet started construction.

When news of the Northrop-Hendy 10,000 HP turboprop engine reached the aviation press, it likely caught Jeffer's attention. The M-10002 and its cars (known as the 3rd Train) had been removed from service in March 1943. Some cars were reassigned and others were scrapped. The two-unit locomotive was officially retired in December 1946. There is a note in Kratville's Union Pacific Streamliners book (page 98) that in 1947 "the two power units were sold to Northrup-Hendy Co. [sic]"

I looked among all my piles of files, and found the same information, all that the locomotive was sold to Northrop-Hendy. I decided to look at the Trains magazine DVD, and found the attached, from the October 1957 issue, page 25.

I'd sure like to find out if the locomotive was actually sold, or if UP simply loaned it them. In the April 14, 1947 issue of the online Sandusky Register-Star-News newspaper, I found a note that mentioned both Turbodyne and Union Pacific: "Their application to airplanes, as well as to other uses, has been studied, and currently a study is being made of the use of the Turbodyne as a locomotive power for railroads, in cooperation with William M. Jeffers of the Union Pacific."

I hate it when research only asks more questions, instead of answering them.

Don Strack



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 04/22/14 09:36 by donstrack.

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Don, the Newberry *MIGHT* have a car card for it, as it was constructed by Pullman-Standard. P-S made car cards for anything they touched - built, maintained, repaired, painted, washed, etc. So, there might be something there - and they usually followed pieces into the 50s.

I'm curious:

Any info on why the M10002 was retired in 1943? Seems to me that during the height of WW2 traffic, the railroad were pressing into service any rolling stock they could get their hands on. If the WW2 traffic volume swamped the train's capacity on the Chicago to LA run, wouldn't the UP have reassigned it to another route that was a better fit for the available seating vs. just retiring the train?


- Norm

In the photo, note the WWII hooded headlight above the windshields.

I thought the UP M-series streamliners were built from aluminum, which made them quite valuable as scrap for the war effort.

I remember seeing this sight along the Pacific Electric's El Segundo line at the Northrop Hawthorne, CA Plant when I was riding in the family car back in the mid 1940s. I have asked around for many years and none could answer my questions about the UP streamliner which now turns out to be the UP M-10002.

I don't even recall the Trains Magazine article. I will have to search for it now.

--Jim Baker, Whittier, CA



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/22/14 18:21 by JimBaker.

west Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> Another suggestion would be to attempt to find
> info via the various aircraft museums. Perhaps
> Northrup has
> an archive somewhere. I'd assume something that
> old would be declassified.

When GE bought the interests of Turbodyne in 1950, I would think that it would have included anything such as this experimental project. I suspect it would not have been classified, but getting access to it would put any researcher up against what any company would consider proprietary. I did a lot of research back in 1988-1990 about UP's and EMD's development of turbochargers. I hit a brick wall when it came time to get better information about EMD's turbocharger design.

Back when I was working for Uncle Sam, I had a chance to visit what was then the Westinghouse facility at Sunnyvale. Westinghouse had built Peackeeper (MX) ICBM launch canisters (tubes 90+ feet by 15+ feet) that were installed in 50 Minuteman ICBM sites in Wyoming, and we were asked to look at the tooling, jigs and fixtures in the early 1990s to determine if we wanted to store it someplace, or let Westinghouse simply scrap it. We were given a nice long tour of the entire Sunnyvale facility because they wanted to impress us with their capability. I recall that the large buildings were all WWII vintage heavy timber construction, with some of the largest metal fabrication machines I have ever seen. As a journeyman boilermaker, I really do appreciate big metal. They literally could make anything. Back in one corner was a set of steam locomotive drivers they were storing for a local restoration group, and in another area of the same building was a completely self-contained ultra clean room used to acclimate the precision high-speed drive gears for Navy nuclear submarines.

Don Strack

"Journeyman boilermaker"?