I love weird tech, and it’s really hard to beat the weirdness that the cold war created here and in Russia.. I grew up at the tail end of the cold war that Ronald Reagan, all praise his name, helped bring to an end while I was still in high school.. Anyway, where was I?? Oh, right, jet powered trains.. Really, jet powered trains..

In 1966 New York Central converted a Rail Diesel Car in to a jet powered train by adding a pair of General Electric J47-19 turbojet engines.. Normally these engines sit under the wing tip of a Convair B-36D intercontinental bomber.

To help the train cut through the air better a large nose was added to the train. Apparently it was pretty fast too. It reached 184mph on it’s way to Ohio. Not too bad for a train in the 60s..

The jet trains don’t end here. I found a Russian version made just a few years later.. But more on that in a few days..

We traded in the Corvette a while back for a bigger truck.. The horse trailer and everything else were just killing my Dodge 1500, so we go this Ford F350 Dually with the turbo deisel.. Wonderful truck.. Plenty of power and very comfortable..

But there is never really enough power..

So I had the guys down at Byron’s hook me up with a new Superchips programmer.. (Part#: 1805) Three basic settings, economy, towing, and performance.. We got it mostly for the econo setting.. Current gas mileage isn’t bad, but 13.6mpg on nearly $3/gallon deisel gets old real fast.. Since I just picked up the truck this morning I don’t have any new numbers yet.. But, it’s set on performance right now anyway so I doubt I’ll see much improvement there..

What I have seen is a huge increase in power.. I didn’t think it would be this notciable.. But I can now stand on the gas at a stop sign and spin the tires.. And not just a little spin, and whole lot of smoke and rubber spin.. With a dually.. That’s about 32″ of ruber contacting the road and it will still bust them loose and go..

This should be fun..

~Fey