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
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