My first stop (other than the truck area of Interstate rest stops) on my westward journey was the Amarillo Railroad Museum. There were two attractants – this post is about the full-sized one on the tracks out back: the White Train.
From 1951 to 1987 the White Train moved nuclear warheads from the Pantex facility northeast of Amarillo where they were manufactured to where they were deployed. I’m not sure how I stumbled over the White Train; I’m thinking maybe it was a stray historical photo the Instagram algorithm tossed on to my timeline. Regardless, once I found out I could see a representative consist in northern Texas, a detour from my normal New England to Austin route was a must.
The typical train was an engine – as far as I can tell. just one, since the train topped out at 35 mph – a guard escort car, a power buffer car, some number of weapons transport cars, another power buffer car and, bringing up the rear, another guard escort car.
The guard escort cars were just what it says on the box: repurposed Army kitchen cars set up for the security detail that accompanied the warheads. There were bunks, bathrooms, a kitchen/lounge area, a comm station and a lookout turret. One of the cars was open for exploration and my gosh, what a Dr. Strangelove vibe. You can see all my photos from the museum here; but a couple of the things that struck me:
Hot brass vacuum system, because you don’t want expended shells bouncing around when you’re shooting evildoers.
Ashtrays everywhere, of course.
A pano of the turret.
Buffer cars are normally used to keep some distance between the crew and any hazardous loads. In this case I’ve gotta think they were mainly for protecting the weapons transport cars from an engine fire or the like. If something went seriously wrong with the warheads (I’m guessing they were rendered un-mushroomable, but cracking open casings in a derailment would suck) I’d want a lot more distance than 50 feet or so. The other thing these buffer cars did was supply power to the guard escort cars. The history of powering, heating and cooling passenger rail cars is fun digression that I might post on sometime, but regardless of that tech tangent, freight locos are not provisioned to deal with passengers, so a power car was needed.
Top is the guard escort car, bottom is the power buffer car.
I don’t have much to say about the weapons transport car other than I wish I’d had a geiger counter with me. There wasn’t much to see on the side of the car and, though I thought about climbing up to have a look at the top, I didn’t want to presume on my host’s hospitality.
I chatted with one of the museum members about modelling the White Train – happily, someone had been by earlier in the year taking measurements, photos, etc. with an eye towards producing some kits. I’ll keep my fingers crossed. I’d love to build 2 pair of guard and buffer cars and put a (freelanced, obv) shoggoth containment vessel on a depressed center flatcar and containment vessel support machinery on another, smaller flatcar. Yep. I’m a weirdo.