Gas turbine locomotive turbine locomotive to be used on British Railways. The locomotive was to be built by the North British Locomotive Company and the turbine would be supplied by C. A. Parsons and Company. According to Sampson, the plan was to use indirect heating. The pulverized coal would be burned in a combustion chamber and the hot gases passed to a heat exchanger. Here, the heat would be transferred to a separate body of compressed air which would power the turbine. Essentially, it would have been a hot air engine using a turbine instead of a piston. Robertson shows a diagram which
Robert Huber (engineer) first was the AC-2, running on petrol (gasoline). The second was the AC-3, which was similar but ran on diesel fuel. Eighteen types of free-piston engine were built and tested. In 1932, Huber read a book by Professor Lomonosov about diesel locomotives. He also heard of a proposal by Petro Shelest for turbines driven by compressed air. This information gave him the idea of developing the free-piston gas turbine. Several of these were designed but not built. Finally, in 1938-39, the world's first free-piston generator was built. It used two G-30 machines and drove an 800 kW alternator. Huber stayed