THE JET ENGINES ROAR. THE PILOT AND copilot push the hurtling test vehicle to its limit. Technicians measure the stress on metal parts, the rising temperatures, and the vibrations created by mounting velocity, all the while clocking the speed of the machine. Then the run is over; observers announce that it has set a speed record.

This scene took place in the summer of 1966. The site was not an experimental air base but a peaceful stretch of farmland in western Ohio. Don Wetzel, on the staff of the New York Central Railroad’s Cleveland Technical Center, was the engineer that day as his vehicle established a land speed record for locomotives.

It happened during a low point in American railroad history. In a year and a half, two of the country’s best-known lines, the New York Central and the Pennsylvania, would merge into one of its least loved, Penn Central. Passenger rail was dying everywhere as the interstate highway system completed its major routes and airlines drew increasing numbers of travelers. Amtrak still lay a decade in the future. Even on the busy East Coast corridor, passenger traffic was hanging on with dilapidated rolling stock and aging motive power. Yet amid all these woes the New York Central was testing high-speed rail service.

Before the jet-locomotive test, most of the work done at the Cleveland Technical Center had consisted of such humdrum but necessary procedures as material stress tests and engine performance runs. Then, one day early in the summer of 1966, Don Wetzel, the assistant director of technical research, and his colleagues were assigned a unique task: Build a rolling laboratory to collect data on possible high-speed rail service on the New York Central’s regular main-line track. They were given 45 days and a blank check to put the program together.

On the eve of his 20-year railroad career, Wetzel, serving in the Marines, had gotten a pilot’s license. When he joined the Central in 1950, he became one of the final engineers to be qualified to run steam locomotives. So Don Wetzel was the last steam engineer on the New York Central and its first and only jet engineer.

The company borrowed a 13-year-old Budd RDC3, a self-propelled diesel commuter coach, from an Eastern line and towed it to Cleveland, where its motors and passenger seats were removed and replaced with more than 50 instruments to measure speed, stress, bearing temperatures, and ride characteristics. Small radio transmitters were affixed to the front axles and electronic sensors studded other parts of the locomotive. Real-time data was written to magnetic tape, displayed on oscilloscopes, and recorded by direct-writing oscillographs. Remote-controlled cameras made a visual record; track irregularities were recorded digitally.

While this may seem very high tech for 1966, the basic idea for such a real-time rolling laboratory had been used by the New York Central since the 1930s, when instrumentfilled baggage cars tested locomotive and track performance. No other changes were made to the Budd RDC3; the axles, wheels, and frame were the ones the commuter car had been born with. The total cost of the experiment was officially $35,000; the actual figure was probably several times that. (The company boasted that the project did not use a cent of government funds.)

Wetzel and his crew adapted two General Electric J-47-19 jet engines, which had been designed as boosters for the Convair B-36 intercontinental bomber. These were mounted just above the engineer’s station at the front of the car. Wetzel’s original design had the jet engines at the rear, but this changed after his wife, making her point with some sketches on a dinner napkin, suggested that the locomotive would look better with them mounted up front. This switch also helped keep the nose of the locomotive on the tracks. The Cleveland shop fashioned a black streamlined cowling for the front of the Budd car, which was designated M-497. Workers called it the Black Beetle.

The M-497 was taken to the stretch of New York Central main line that ran between Butler, Indiana, and Stryker, Ohio. Said to be the second-longest run of straight track in the country, it consisted almost completely of standard 39-foot sections of 26-year-old bolted rail (with one short four-mile portion of welded rail).

The M-497 was fired up for a series of test runs that lasted about a week. Alfred E. Perlman, president of the line, was there, and having both observed and ridden the locomotive, he approved a series of runs to measure the effects of excessive speed. On July 23, 1966, Wetzel, the chief pilot, wearing a jet pilot’s helmet emblazoned with the New York Central logo, opened up the GE jets and sent the M-497 rolling. According to Wetzel,“We were just holding on. It was a ride!” With Perlman in the copilot’s seat and other N.Y.C. executives on board, movie cameras posted at milepost 347+13 recorded the M-497 flashing by at 183.85 miles per hour, a U.S. rail-speed record that stands to this day.

The Central called the tests a success because they proved that high-speed rail service was feasible on a conventional right-of-way. However, the Black Beetle was little more than an improvised affair, the quickest way to achieve the high speeds needed for test purposes. Jet-powered Budd cars were never seriously considered for practical passenger service, and modern high-speed trains in France, Japan, England, and the United States all use conventional diesel-electric or all-electric motive power. After its moment of glory the M-497 went back to Cleveland, where it was dismantled and returned to its quotidian life as a commuter car. Its ultimate fate is unknown.

WETZEL AND HIS TEAM REUSED THE jet engines for another research project, a high-powered snow blower for opening winter track. In tests at the Central’s Buffalo yards, the jet blower efficiently cleared the rails; it also blasted most of the ties and ballast from under them. But after a few adjustments the blower proved less destructive, and it eventually went into regular service, becoming a prototype for jet-powered blowers on railroads across the country.

Although federal transportation officials dismissed the Black Beetle as a publicity stunt staged to encourage federal funding for high-speed rail, the test itself was taken seriously; it produced a great deal of usable data and suggested that high-speed rail was possible on existing roadbeds. The Central’s showy use of jet engines to reach record speed, though, cast a dubious tinge over the whole affair.

According to Perlman, the M-497 tests were meant “to determine how we can best serve the needs of the traveling public for fast, reliable and less-costly intercity transportation, and, at the same time, combat the rising trend of our passenger deficit which is threatening the continuation of all rail passenger services.” In fact, shortly after the Black Beetle tests Perlman announced that the New York Central was abandoning conventional passenger service on routes longer than 200 miles—including such storied trains as the 20th Century Limited, the Wolverine, and the Empire State Express—to concentrate on fast intercity service on shorter runs. This plan disappeared with the Penn Central merger. In view of the current sorry state of high-speed intercity rail service in the United States, one can only wish that the New York Central’s experiment had been either less bold or less experimental.