Union Pacific Fed Coal Dust Into A Turbine — It Sandblasted The Engine To Death

In the 1960s, Union Pacific was obsessed with jet power. They ran the largest fleet of gas turbine locomotives in the world. But as oil prices rose, they decided to try something radical: A jet engine that ran on coal.

The concept was simple: Take the railroad's cheap coal reserves, pulverize them into dust, and spray them into a turbine combustor.

But the engineers forgot one fatal detail. Coal contains ash. And when you shoot microscopic silica particles at turbine blades spinning at 5,000 RPM, you don't get power. You get a sandblaster.

Union Pacific Number 80 became the only locomotive in history designed to literally eat its own engine.

This is the story of the "Coal Turbine"—a machine that eroded itself to death from the inside out.

In this video: 🚂 The Monster: The 3-unit behemoth designed to process coal at 60 MPH. ⚙️ The Tech: How they turned rock into "fluidized" fuel. 🌪️ The Failure: The "Cyclone Separators" that failed to catch the deadly fly ash. 💀 The Autopsy: How the blades were scrubbed away by their own fuel.

👇 The Verdict: Was this a worthy experiment or a waste of money? Let us know in the comments.

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