Gas turbine on and off to run it only at high efficiency. The emergence of the continuously variable transmission may also alleviate the responsiveness problem. Turbines have historically been more expensive to produce than piston engines, though this is partly because piston engines have been mass-produced in huge quantities for decades, while small gas turbine engines are rarities; however, turbines are mass-produced in the closely related form of the turbocharger. The turbocharger is basically a compact and simple free shaft radial gas turbine which is driven by the piston engine's exhaust gas. The centripetal turbine wheel drives a centrifugal compressor wheel through
Gas turbine locomotive The locomotive was scrapped some time later. Although these experiments had mixed results, they were the most powerful locomotives with purely mechanical powertrain in the world and thus also the most powerful independent-traction locomotives in Czechoslovakia. The British Rail GT3 was a simple machine consisting essentially of a standard oil-fired gas turbine mounted on a standard steam locomotive chassis, built as a demonstrator by English Electric in 1961. Its almost crude simplicity enabled it to avoid much of the unreliability which had plagued the complex experimental GTELs 18000 and 18100 in earlier years, but it nevertheless failed to be competitive