Wikipedia:Today's featured article/February 20, 2017

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An RTL Turboliner crosses the Seneca River near Savannah, New York, in 1984.

The Turboliners were a family of gas turbine trains built for Amtrak in the 1970s. They were purchased by Amtrak to update its fleet with faster, more modern trains. The first batch, known as RTGs, were built by the French firm ANF and entered service on multiple routes in the Midwestern United States in 1973. The new trains increased ridership wherever they were used, but the high cost of operating the trains led to their withdrawal from the Midwest in 1981. The second batch, known as RTLs (example pictured), were of a similar design but manufactured by Rohr Industries, an American company. These entered service on the Empire Corridor in the State of New York in 1976. The RTLs remained in service there through the 1990s, supplemented by several rebuilt RTGs. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, New York and Amtrak partnered to rebuild the RTLs for high-speed service; this project failed and Amtrak withdrew them from service in 2003. After the settlement of legal issues, the last RTLs were sold for scrap in 2012. (Full article...)

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