Did you hear about the 100-mph train from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia?
I hadn’t either. But a Mt. Lebanon woman with the lyrical name of Blondina Bellaver called last week. She wanted to know why, with all these stories about hyperloop, nobody ever mentioned the short-lived fast train to Philly circa 1956.
She’d ridden what she recalled as “The Bullet Train” on many a Friday night because she had a cross-state boyfriend back in the day. She thought the Japanese might have had something to do with it. (The train, that is, not the romance.)
A computer search of the Pittsburgh newspaper archives for “bullet train” in that era turned up zilch. But Henry Posner III, chairman of Railroad Development Corp. in Green Tree and an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said Mrs. Bellaver was thinking of the AeroTrain.
Soon enough, I found a quarter-page ad in the Jan. 16, 1956, issue of The Pittsburgh Press: “The New Pennsy AeroTrain . . . Outside ... Inside ... In Every Way ... the AeroTrain is different from any train you have ever seen! Combines, for the first time, motor car ideas and newest train ideas.”
General Motors built the train at the request of The Pennsylvania Railroad — and the experiment died the year after its February 1956 launch when the Pennsy sent the leased train back to GM.
The train left Pittsburgh for Philadelphia and New York at 4 p.m., just as Mrs. Bellaver remembered. The schedule in the ad said there were seven stops before it arrived in Philadelphia at 10:02 p.m., but she said some of those stops were dropped before long.
“I made it a point to get that train,” she said. She’d swear it arrived in Philadelphia around 8 p.m. There, her beau would be waiting (wearing a fedora, no doubt). “It was fantastic.”
The only train to Philadelphia now, The Pennsylvanian, leaves at 7:30 a.m and makes 13 stops before arriving seven hours and 25 minutes later. The first leg to Harrisburg may be the only thing slower than health care reform. Still, 221,450 rode The Pennsylvanian in 2017 — about four of every 10 beginning or ending their trips in Pittsburgh.
A detail about the AeroTrain that Mrs. Bellaver hadn’t shared in our first conversation proved its undoing. “It was a little shaky. I remember that.”
Yeah, it shook itself right off the rails. An August 1957 PG had an Associated Press story that bore the headline: “Lightweight trains find going rough.
“A cynical breed of passengers has dubbed the lightweights ‘the tin fish’ or ‘the Elvis Presley’ because of their rock ‘n’ roll motion.” No railway had ordered another lightweight train from GM in 1957, the story noted, and it already had disappeared from Pennsylvania tracks.
Joe Sherlock, who writes the automobile blog “The View Through the Windshield,” noted that the Pennsy was losing millions on its passenger operations when it and other railroads approached GM in the early 1950s. They sought something that “would combine light-weight, high-speed and low operating cost.” The Aerotrain was designed by Chuck Jordan, who was later instrumental in the design of the 1958 Corvette.
“It was essentially a string of modified GM bus bodies on rails pulled by a 1,200-horsepower diesel engine,” Mr. Sherlock wrote. Its engine had a wraparound windshield and its rear had an “observation car/tail looking like the back end of a 1955 Chevy Nomad station wagon.”
But the silver 10-coach train made with stainless steel from Allegheny Ludlum was so light — about half the tonnage of a standard train of the same capacity — it rattled the riders when it traveled anywhere close to its designed top speed of 100 mph.
“The train of the future rode like an old truck,” wrote Mr. Sherlock.
He has fond memories of riding it as 12-year-old, leaving Philadelphia for Pittsburgh just after 9 a.m. and returning on the same train and reaching Philly a little after 10 p.m. But he realizes now that GM was so fixated on style and low cost, it forgot about comfort, and that would hurt the company later with some of its cars.
GM didn’t give up after Pittsburgh. It shipped an Aerotrain to Union Pacific for a Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas run that landed Liberace in the engineer’s seat for the inaugural. But the product was doomed, Mr. Sherlock said, because GM didn’t test the product under real-world conditions before leasing it.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission will spend $2 million it doesn't have to study a scheme to transport people and freight in pods going more than 500 miles per hour between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. It ought to hold off on spending that until hyperloop is ready to ride.
Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or Twitter @brotheroneill
First Published: April 11, 2019, 9:00 a.m.
