HO Scale Nuclear Train

Gallery Article by Alvis 3.1 on Jan 8 2011

Silly Week 2011

 

The 1970s! When anything was possible, especially if the government was paying! With that atmosphere, was it any surprise that somebody thought a nuclear powered train would be brilliant?

Canadian National Railways, a government owned railway, teamed up with CANDU, Canada's nuclear reactor manufacturer to create an unique type of locomotive: Nuclear powered! Funneling massive amounts of tax dollars into this project, how could it fail? CANDU had the know how, in fact, I hesitate to say it..the "Can Do" attitude to make a small, powerful and relatively "safe" reactor, and CN had, well, a locomotive laying about. Taking an old F-7, it was gutted and configured to run a water cooled reactor in place of the usual Diesel-Electric. One unexpected benefit was that if you ran the reactor a little bit "hot", you killed all the weeds along the right-of-way. Neat, eh?

Monorail! Monorail! Monorail! Everyone loved monorails back in the 70s, so why not make it an monorail? That way, you'd eliminate the pesky problem of level crossings and the inevitable accidental plowing down of some large vehicle and the attendant trouble cleaning up a reactor spill. So who cares if you'd need massive amounts of reinforced concrete to build the monorail track, you had the government backing the whole thing... 

And then, troubles began. "Environmentalists" (darn dirty hippies, if you ask me) got all uppity over the nuclear powerplant, the Railway workers unions began making noises about retraining costs and being replaced by "engineers with sliderules", and it was discovered that the train require massive amounts of water to cool the reactor, in fact, more than the old steam locomotives required! More dire, Montreal won the 1976 Olympics. They too had oodles of government money backing them, and they too also needed copious amounts of concrete, but what really killed off the project was the name. CN and CANDU decided to combine their names into one, and some twit called it the "CN-DU". Bombardier immediately sued as it was far too close the "See-Do" in their mind, and amazingly, two provincial and one federal court agreed. The project was shelved, after a huge expenditure, and all that's left to show for it is a patch of railway that to this day won't grow weeds!

Click on images below to see larger images

Oh what to do with an HO scale locomotive shell? Well, if you're me, this is what. I'm pretty sure some railroad modellers are not amused..

I used the launch track from the Pegasus kit of the Space Ark from "When Worlds Collide" as the Monorail track, with a large chunk of square tubing attached as the monorail. The reactor is made from spares and bits and stuff laying aboot my house. The cooling tower was "heat formed" over a candy thermometer...imagine my wife's great  amusement (or not) when she walked into the room to find me plunging her candy thermometer into a sheet of droopy styrene. I should have asked first. Always ask first kids!

Alvis 3.1

Photos and text © by Alvis 3.1