Скачать или смотреть The Steam That Wasn’t Steam | Britain’s GT3 Gas Turbine Experiment

In 1962, British Railways tested one of the strangest locomotives ever built.

It looked like a traditional steam engine — complete with a boiler, tender, and classic 4-6-0 wheel arrangement. But inside, there was no firebox. No steam pressure. No pistons.

Instead, the GT3 hid a 2,700 horsepower gas turbine spinning at 15,000 RPM.

Designed by English Electric’s Vulcan Foundry, GT3 was an attempt to combine the mechanical simplicity of steam with the high-power potential of aircraft-derived turbine technology. On paper, it worked. The locomotive ran. It climbed Shap Summit. It reached 90 mph.

But railways are systems — not experiments.

As British Railways removed turntables and standardized diesel-electric traction, GT3 became a machine without a future. Powerful, innovative… and fundamentally incompatible with the network it was built to serve.

This is the story of Britain’s strangest locomotive experiment — the machine that looked like steam, sounded like a jet, and proved that raw horsepower is never enough.