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Pacer - American style!


rockershovel
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Part of one of the Aerotrains is at the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay, WI......(photos taken in 2011)

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The coaching stock is rather short, and you can recognise its bus origins from the window style.

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The LEV Railbus is still at the Connecticut Trolley Museum as far as I know, though it was shown on their "disposals" list a year or so back as they no longer wanted to keep it in their collection. (Photo taken in 2004, and is now no longer under cover - last known of on a siding alongside their running line, off the main site)

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Those LWT12s - the Aerotrains - were geared for a maximum of 102 mph. In fact 60 was about as much as anyone could stand  - or importantly, sit through. Rock Island ordered one, got saddled with the two demonstrators as well. Nobody else bid for any. Since GM was by far the dominant manufacturer of diesel locos in that era (1956) one wonders why it felt the need to devise a rival to Talgo, Explorer etc in the market for lightweight trains trying to fend off the motor car and Boeing 707. 

 

The Rock was credited with never meeting a diesel it didn't like, and it had a wonderfully catholic mix of diesels, which may have contributed to it turning its toes up in March 1980. 

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The Aerotrain was more "Buck Rogers" era than Star Trek.....I remember seeing and taking the tour of the GM demo during its visit to Portland,Oregon sometime in the 1950's. The styling went along with the styling of massive fins on late 50's behemoth automobiles. 

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1 hour ago, Oldddudders said:

Since GM was by far the dominant manufacturer of diesel locos in that era (1956) one wonders why it felt the need to devise a rival to Talgo, Explorer etc in the market for lightweight trains trying to fend off the motor car and Boeing 707. 

 

 

 

Indeed. Given the single-ended doors at alternate ends, and single axles, it seems to have been god-made for articulated bogies. One wonders if that was the original intention, but that something went wrong?

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50 minutes ago, APOLLO said:

On this video at 3min 25 sec is a shot of an experimental Fiat "self propelled" railcar being demonstrated in 1977, again on the Rock Island - dig the squeaky horns !!

 

Brit15

 

I had never seen any details of one of those Fiat railcars doing a demonstration tour in the US before!

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That's an ALn 668 - again available in H0, in its original Italian form (& almost identical livery!) from Rivarossi.

 

Now, doesn't the Rock look appealing with all these additional, weird units!?! I knew about BL2s and the like but such 'oddities' make it rather tempting. I wonder if "my" road, the C&NW, could have been tempted to try such a thing!!!

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9 hours ago, NickBrad said:

This seems to be the only image i can find on the interwebs of the Pacer in use in America,

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However, Donoteat and co cover the history etc very well in the latter part of this video, 

 

Not strictly a Pacer, that's a LEV railbus - presumably the one now in the Connecticut Trolley Museum.  An actual Pacer ran in Vancouver for Expo 86 (edited).  Not too surprisingly no sales resulted from either enterprise.  

 

Talgo also had some involvement in the States in the mid-20th century, separately from the sets that now run in the Pacific Northwest.  Some of their designs were a bit "Jetsons" too!   

Edited by Edwin_m
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You are indeed right, it is a Railbus rather than a Pacer, although the fact that either made their way across the pond is remarkable and not really in a good way. It's almost as remarkable as the fact we still have pacers on the uK network today, despite much better rolling stock being condemned and cut up as replacement stock is built.

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1 hour ago, Edwin_m said:

Not strictly a Pacer, that's a LEV railbus - presumably the one now in the Connecticut Trolley Museum.  An actual Pacer ran in Vancouver for Expo 96 (I think).  Not too surprisingly no sales resulted from either enterprise.  

 

 

No, the railbus at the Connecticut Trolley Museum is not the one used on SEPTA or other locations in the US or Canada at that time.

The SEPTA one is RB002 (or 004, depending on what the source of info is...), which also spent some time on demonstration in Denmark and Sweeden, which presumably explained its presence at Colchester on 30th June 1985....(and which caught my by surprise as my train passed through!)

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Edited by Johann Marsbar
updated possible type designation
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14 minutes ago, Johann Marsbar said:

It was 142 049 that went to Expo 86 in Vancouver, BC, and this (assuming the link works) is the only photo I could find of it in Canada...

 

Whilst a bit O/T, does anyone else remember this Bristol LH at the 1984 Doncaster Works open day?

 

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You have an opportunity to feature British rail engineering in front of the world......and you send a Pacer. Then we wonder why British manufacturing has almost died.

 

On a similar theme to that bus, SNCF had a number of Citroen C35s with bodywork to look like a TGV. Would have loved to get my hands on one of them.

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.... the Pacer is actually quite good Engineering, in the sense of doing for one dollar, what anyone can do for two dollars. It meets its design specification, and has long outlived its original design life in service. 

 

It’s a horrible thing to ride in, but that was never the design specification; which is probably why it was never a success outside its home market. Any half-competent engineer with a home bus producer could produce something similar, quite quickly. 

Edited by rockershovel
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5 hours ago, Johann Marsbar said:

It was 142 049 that went to Expo 86 in Vancouver, BC, and this (assuming the link works) is the only photo I could find of it in Canada...

 

 

Here's one of it at Abbotsford:

http://www.railforthevalley.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/RftV-001.jpg

 

I did the trip on it from New Westminster to Abbotsford on what was then the BC Hydro railway (now Southern Railway of BC). I have a couple of pictures taken that day, but that was before the days of digital cameras, and they're buried in a box somewhere. One big concern was the speed and quietness of the units, combined with many ungated crossings, on a line where pedestrians and car drivers were used to seeing slow, noisy diesel-hauled drag freights. The BCH crews were very relieved to get through the summer of 1986 without a crossing accident.

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To keep the matter in perspective, I shouldn’t think that the D&RGW “Galloping Goose” railcars offered a particularly comfortable ride, but they have become an icon of the later days of the narrow gauge. 

 

The early diesel railbuses were pretty lively things to ride in, and had low-comfort bus type seating - but they were very popular with their users, because they were clean, modern and reliable. 

 

Pacers belong to an era in which the travelling public had become educated to expect better things, and judged them accordingly. They share that with the much-disliked “WAGN trains” of the Peterborough - London route; perfectly adequate units, but grossly over-crowded and hopelessly under-heated for a 90-minute, early-morning commute (especially in wet weather, when the floor rapidly became coated in a thin, sloppy wet paste) and costing the same fare  as the far superior HST, found immediate and lasting disfavour. 

 

 

Edited by rockershovel
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