BUDD—RDC’S

By Bill Meyer, TCA #97-45465, Bob Mintz, TCA #92-35064, and Dr. Joseph Lechner, TCA #01-52673 Winter 2025 e*Train

The Budd Co. built 398 Rail Diesel Cars between 1949 and 1962, both domestic and export. The cars were made of stainless steel and shot-welded together.

62 were exported and 336 cars were used in North America, of which 28 different roads purchased them, not including the Budd Demonstrator. The “dome” on top of an RDC was a heat exchanger for the car’s air conditioning and exhaust from the (usually two) diesel engines.

The New York Central received their first pair in April 1950. The Boston & Maine was the largest owner operating 110 RDCs including all of the RDC-9 models.

The New Haven had a fleet of 40 units. In the 1970s, Amtrak also ran RDCs. In Canada, the Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, and British Columbia Railway all ran RDCs. In 1978 with the formation of VIA, they also ran acquired RDCs.

Some commuter lines, such as the Virginia Railway Express, used the RDC-9 which looks almost identical to an RDC-1 except that it has only one diesel engine instead of two. An RDC-9 doesn’t have enough power to run alone, but it does have sufficient power to operate in a long train with twin-motored RDCs.

Most other railroads used RDCs for branch lines that didn’t generate enough traffic to justify a locomotive hauling traditional passenger cars. On those roads, the train usually consisted of a single RDC; in that case, twin-motor power was essential.

UNITED STATES/CANADA/FOREIGN

RDC-1 161/31/45
RDC-2 31/27/11
RDC-3 31/10/6
RDC-4 6/9/0
RDC-9 30/0/0

RDC-1 90 coach seats, including one men’s room at one end and a women’s room at the other end.  Weighed 118,300 pounds and was 85 feet in length.

RDC-2 70 coach seats, including one common toilet in the passenger end.  Had a 17-foot baggage express section.  Weighed 114,200 pounds and was 85 feet in length.

RDC-3 had 48 coach seats, a baggage express compartment, and a 15-foot Railway Post Office section.  Toilets were located in the passenger section and the Railway Post section.  It weighed 117,900 pounds and was 85 feet in length.

RDC-4 was designed exclusively for mail and express.  It contained a 31-foot baggage express compartment and a 30-foot mail compartment.  It had a toilet in the mail section and another in the baggage express portion. It weighed 109,200 pounds and was 74 feet 10 inches in length.

RDC-9 was a blind-powered trailer with no windows or controls at the ends and carried 94 passengers.  It contained a single toilet at one end.  It was not designed for independent operation but had a single 300hp engine which was activated from the standard RDC that was in multiple units with it.  It was 85 feet in length.

There were two foreign variations. These variations related to the track gauge size as well as coach and buffet car versions for Rede Ferroviaria Federal SA (RFFSA) of Brazil, and later the narrow gauge by Ferrovai Paulista SA (FEPASA) of Brazil.

RDC-1.A-1 & RDC-1.A-2 were broad gauge (5 feet 3 inches).  They came as coaches and buffet cars

RDC-1.B-1 was narrow gauge or meter gauge (3 feet 6 inches).  It came as a coach (56 seats) and buffet car (48 seats)

RDC-2.A-1 was broad gauge (5 feet 3 inches).  It came as a coach only.

“Commuter operations along the East Coast of the United States had been taken over by either a state, regional, or city transit authority by 1976.  These agencies brought a renewed interest in short-haul service.  Since they were funded by the Urban Mass Transit Authority or some state agency, it was only natural they were able to obtain funds for new equipment.  Budd engineers came up with two models for a proposed self-propelled rail diesel car that could utilize the Metroliner shell.  They called it the SPV-2000.  In essence, it was “A Self-Propelled Vehicle with a service life through the year 2000.”  The proposed cars were offered with a blunt or stream-lined end and would be capable of maximum speeds of 100 to 120 m.p.h.  Although the SPV-2000 was state-of-the-art in self-propelled rail motor cars, it was not selling as well as Budd had predicted…All the roads that had purchased the SPV-2000 were beginning to experience manifold problems with the General Motors Detroit engines…The manifold problem was certainly a big enough annoyance, but to add to it the cars operated by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (Boston) were having starter problems.” (1)

“In the fall of 1984, the Budd Company’s railcar-producing unit at the Red Lion plant was reorganized and renamed Transit America, Inc.  Along with this, it would discontinue the manufacture of stainless steel railroad passenger rolling stock and specialize in rapid transit and light rail vehicles.”  

“Canada’s Bombardier purchased all the passenger car designs of Transit America, Inc. late in December 1987.  Its primary goal was to garner a portion of the United States railcar market.

The Budd Company who could proudly lay claim to pioneering the use of stainless steel in the railroad car market and building America’s first streamlined train, the Pioneer Zephyr, was gone.  In its heyday, Budd had employed over 2,400 people at its Red Lion Plant and had built 12,000 stainless steel cars over 50 years.” (2)

FOOTNOTE: The information above including the SPV-2000 was fact-checked using:

RCD-The Budd Rail Diesel Car

Donald Duke & Edmund Keilty

Golden West Books

San Marino, California 91118-8250

Copyright © 1990

Pages 86-88

Pages 107-112 (1)

Pages 114 (2)

Pages 244-246

Pages 251-270                             

Lionel first produced RDCs in 1957 and in 1977, MPC issued a Budd Set as an uncataloged Service Station Set.

Black Beetle

In the summer of 1966, a Budd RDC-3 became the fastest vehicle on U.S. Rails.  M-497 was a creation of the Cleveland Technical Center, a $1 million research laboratory located at New York Central’s Collinwood (Ohio) shops.  The purpose of “Black Beetle”, as it was nicknamed, was to determine whether high-speed passenger service was feasible over existing NYC tracks.

A mechanical engineer named Donald C. Wetzel designed the M-497 and supervised its construction.  Wetzel used jet power because that was the least expensive way to get a car moving at speeds in excess of 180 mph.  He purchased two surplus General Electric J47 engines from the United States Air Force.  These were mounted on the roof of the stainless-steel Budd car, still housed in their wing pod from a B-36H Peacemaker *.

For the test runs, New York Central chose a portion of its main line between Toledo OH, and Butler IN, because this was the longest stretch of tangent multiple track in the world.  The line was closed to regular traffic for several days while jet-powered experiments were conducted.  On July 23, 1966, near Bryan OH, the M497 was clocked at 183.85 mph.  According to Christopher Dawson, curator of urban and industrial history for the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, Wetzel was throttling back when he hit the speed testing section, so he had been going even faster just moments earlier.

Black Beetle’s officially documented speed of 183.85 mph easily surpassed the previous U.S. record of 127.1 mph set by the Broadway Limited on the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1905.  What’s more, M-497’s record still stands.  It has not been bested by any North American train since then-not by Turbo Train (170.8 mph on December 20, 1967); not by Metroliner (168.3 mph); and not by AMTRAK’s Acela (168 mph on October 11, 1999).

According to Bob Cosgrove of the Detroit Historical Museum, the New York Central regarded this experiment as a success and concluded that its tracks COULD accommodate high-speed travel without special preparation.  After its brief stint in the limelight, M497 was towed back to Cleveland where its jet engines were removed, its torque converters were reconnected, and its seats were replaced.  The RDC3 then spent the rest of its life in commuter service on NYC’s Hudson Line between Poughkeepsie and Harmon NY.

After the 1968 Penn Central merger, M497 was renumbered #97, then renumbered again to #98 a year later.  #98 was sold to Conrail in 1976, then was signed over to MTA but never operated by them.  It was cannibalized for parts in 1977, then it moldered on a weed-grown siding in Croton until it was finally scrapped in 1984.

Meanwhile, the ever-resourceful Cleveland Technical Center recycled M-497’s jet engines to create a snow blower that was dispatched to wintry Buffalo NY.  There, it cleared drifts from the Central’s rail yards, but it also blew away some ties and most of the ballast.  After some tweaking, it became a useful piece of maintenance-of-way equipment.  It inspired jet-powered snow blowers on several other railroads, as well as Lionel #6-29867, which was introduced in NYC colors (2007) but has since been offered in several additional road names.

Lionel #38429 (2011) represents the M-497 in its New York Central livery.  However, Lionel’s model depicts an all-passenger RDC-1, while the real M-497 was an RDC-3.  An RDC-3 had a 17-foot baggage express section, a 15-foot Railway Post Office compartment, and seating for 49 passengers.  M-497 was built with its jet engines at the passenger end; see http://rr-fallenflags.org/nyc/nyc-m497bll.jpg.   Only MTH Electric Trains produces models of the RDC-3 for O gauge 3-rail.

Lionel seldom misses an opportunity to start a collectible series by issuing cars and locomotives in new road names.  #38425, a jet-powered RDC in Rock Island livery, is a figment of Lionel’s imagination.  The CRI&P did own three Budd RDC-3s, but did not experiment with jet power.  Lionel uses roster number #752 on its jet-powered RDC-1; the companion non-powered RDC-1 and RDC-4 are numbered #750 and #751, respectively.  On the real Rock Island, these numbers belonged to three unusual passenger diesels that were designated AB6.  These Electro-Motive E6 B units were equipped with a cab and a set of operator controls.  Rock Island used them on its Rocky Mountain Rocket.  The train ran from Chicago to Limon CO powered by a multiple-unit diesel lashup.  It split into two sections at Limon.  Part of the train went to Colorado Springs behind an AB6, while the rest of its cars went to Denver with the remaining diesel units.

*Aficionados of military aviation will recall that the Convair B-36 was powered by six 3,800-hp reciprocating engines and four jet engines (each providing 5,200 lb of thrust).  At 162′ long and 230′ wingspan with a takeoff weight of 410,000 lbs, the B-36 was for many years the world’s largest mass-produced airplane.  It was the backbone of Strategic Air Command’s intercontinental nuclear force during the 1950s.  You can see several of these behemoths in flight in the movie “Strategic Air Command” (1955; Paramount) starring James Stewart.

LIONEL:

The Postwar issues #400 & #2559 represented RDC-1 which had 9 larger windows and one small window at the end.  In reality, RDC-1 had 11 large windows and one small window, which was for the gender bathrooms at each end, while #404 & #2550 were replicas of RDC-4.  This trend of sets that included both RDC-1s and RDC-4s would continue until the single and 2-car sets in 2023, where RDC-4 was replaced with a new mold manufactured to model RDC-3.  To date, RDC-2 and RDC-9 have not been made.  An easy way to remember the Lionel models is that RDC-1 has 1 small and 9 large windows; RDC-3 has 6 windows and 2 doors, and RDC-4 has 3 windows; 3 small doors, and 1 large door.  The length of each car was 16”

MTH:

The sets consisted of an RDC-1 and RDC-3 while the add-on sets consisted of two RDC-1s.  The dimensions of each car were 16” x 2.5” x 4”, the length the same as the Lionel issue.