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
Westinghouse Combustion Turbine Systems Division the development of a 2000 hp (~1500 kW) gas turbine generator set, the W21. It had a thermal efficiency of 18% (LHV). The first application of the W21 in an industrial setting was in 1948 as a gas-compressor drive installed at the Mississippi River Fuel Corp. facility located at Wilmar, Arkansas. Reports have it that this was the first industrial gas turbine in the world to accumulate 100,000 hours of operation before it was retired. By 1948, Westinghouse also built an experimental 4000 hp gas turbine-driven locomotive with the Baldwin Company (Chester, PA) that used two of these units. Initial