Union Pacific GE Steam Turbine-Electrics (1938): History & Specifications

Published: August 24, 2026

In December 1938 General Electric finished two steam turbine-electric locomotives at Erie, Pennsylvania, for Union Pacific. They were numbered UP 1 and UP 2. Each was a 90-foot-10-inch, 2-C+C-2 machine with a Babcock & Wilcox water-tube boiler at 1,500–1,600 psi, a turbine at 12,500 rpm, and six traction motors. GE rated each unit 2,500 horsepower and the pair, in multiple, 5,000. The February 1939 General Electric Review claimed 125 mph and twice the thermal efficiency of ordinary steam. They were the first turbine locomotives built in North America, GE’s only steam locomotives, and the only condensing steam locomotives that ever ran in American service.

They also never earned a regular assignment. Union Pacific took them at Omaha on April 3, 1939, showed them off from Cheyenne to Los Angeles and on 11th Street in Omaha for Cecil B. DeMille’s film Union Pacific, and sent them back to Erie on June 17. Road failures, helpers, and shop time ended the railroad’s interest by December 1941. Great Northern leased the pair, then lettered GE 1 and GE 2 and painted dark gray, for wartime short-haul freight in Washington in 1943. Both were scrapped at Erie before the war ended. They are not the later Union Pacific gas-turbine electrics. Those burned Bunker C in a gas turbine. These made steam first.

Union Pacific steam turbine #1 at Omaha, NE in 1939

Union Pacific GE steam turbine-electric No. 1 on display in Omaha, Nebraska at 11th Street between Douglas and Farnam on April 29, 1939, during Golden Spike Days and the world premiere of Cecil B. DeMille's Union Pacific. American-Rails.com collection.

On this page: At a glance · Why GE and UP built them · Design · Specifications · Union Pacific, April–June 1939 · Omaha and the movie · After UP: NYC, GN, scrap · What they left

At a Glance

Item	Detail
Builder	General Electric, Erie, Pennsylvania
Railroad numbers	Union Pacific 1 and 2 (later GE 1 and GE 2)
Builder numbers	12136 and 12137
Type	Oil-fired steam turbine-electric (condensing)
Quantity	2 (designed to run as a 5,000 hp pair; each could run alone)
Project start	Late 1936 (GE–UP)
Completed	December 1938 (Erie shop nearly finished by Christmas 1937)
NYC road tests	January–March 1939
Delivered to UP	April 3, 1939, Omaha / Council Bluffs
Returned to GE	June 17, 1939
UP drops the project	December 18, 1941 (President William Jeffers)
Great Northern lease	1943, Spokane–Wenatchee, Washington
Fate	Returned to Erie late 1943; both scrapped before the end of World War II

Why GE and Union Pacific Built Them

By late 1936 Union Pacific already had lightweight streamliners and was taking 4-6-6-4 Challengers and 4-8-4 800-class Northerns. Electro-Motive was selling passenger diesels. GE had turbines from ships and power plants, and it had generators and traction motors. The proposal was an oil-fired “steam-electric locomotive”: a water-tube boiler, a high-speed turbine, electric transmission. No rods, no piston thrust, no hammer blow. Automatic firing. A condenser so the engine would not stop every hundred miles for water. Head-end power for the train. Dynamic braking that put heat back into the feedwater.

GE hoped to deliver a prototype in 1937. The two units took almost two years. A photograph of the Erie erecting bay dated December 24, 1937, shows them about 95 percent complete. Final assembly is dated December 1938. Plant tests followed on GE’s Erie track. Road tests ran on the New York Central from January through March 1939. They then moved west over NYC and Chicago & North Western to Council Bluffs and onto Union Pacific on April 3, 1939.

William Kratville and Harold Ranks later wrote that the pair were “lauded as replacement to steam; successor of diesels.” Don Strack’s Union Pacific diesel history is more precise about what the mechanical department actually wanted: a 60-day demonstration by GE and Babcock & Wilcox against the Challengers of 1936–37, the 800-class 4-8-4s of 1937, and fifteen more Northerns already on order for August 1939. Otto Jabelmann’s steam program and EMC’s E-units were both in the next room. The turbines had to beat both, or they would not stay.

Design

Each locomotive was a single-cab streamliner. The body was a steel frame with riveted sheet, much of it aluminum. The cab sat high, in the manner of UP’s Pullman M-10003 through M-10006 power cars, with a 9-foot nose ahead of the crew. The look was closer to those turret/automobile-cab streamliners and to contemporary EMC diesels than to the original M-10000. Length over the locomotive was 90 feet 10 inches, cab width 10 feet, height 15 feet ¾ inch. Working weight 548,000 pounds (274 tons); adhesive weight about 336,000 pounds.

The running gear was electric, not reciprocating. AAR arrangement 2-C+C-2 (also written 2+C-C+2): a two-axle idler truck, two three-axle powered trucks, a two-axle idler. Whyte notation is the awkward 4-6-0+0-6-4T. GE’s own class string is recorded as 2-C-C-2-530/548-6GE725B—six GE 725B traction motors. Driving wheels 44 inches; leading and trailing wheels 36 inches. Gear ratio 65:31.

Steam came from a Babcock & Wilcox water-tube boiler, oil-fired on Bunker C, with Bailey Meter Company automatic firing and feedwater control from Cleveland. Working pressure was 1,500 to 1,600 psi at about 920°F—far above a contemporary 4-8-4. Steam went to a turbine designed for 12,500 rpm, then through a 10:1 reduction to a generator set at about 1,250 rpm. A twin-armature DC generator fed the six traction motors. A separate three-phase 220-volt AC generator ran traction-motor blowers and head-end power for train lighting, heat, and air conditioning—standard on Amtrak decades later, unusual in 1939.

Exhaust steam went to a condenser and back to the boiler. These two engines are the only condensing steam locomotives known to have operated in North America. Oil and water were sized for a range of about 500 to 700 miles. Dynamic braking ran the traction motors as generators; the resistor heat went into the feedwater loop rather than to rooftop grids. That is regenerative braking in steam clothing.

GE sold and advertised them as a 5,000-horsepower locomotive, usually coupled elephant-style, nose to tail. Each unit had its own cab and could run alone. They could also couple back-to-back. The design target, as later summarized, was a pair able to take twelve Pullmans over 2.2 percent grades.

Specifications (each unit)

Item	Specification
Builder / plant	General Electric, Erie, Pa.
Builder nos.	12136, 12137
Wheel arrangement (AAR)	2-C+C-2 (2+C-C+2)
Wheel arrangement (Whyte)	4-6-0+0-6-4T
Gauge	4 ft 8½ in
Length	90 ft 10 in
Width (cab)	10 ft
Height	15 ft ¾ in
Weight, working order	548,000 lb
Adhesive weight	336,000 lb
Driving-wheel diameter	44 in
Leading / trailing-wheel diameter	36 in
Gear ratio	65:31
Traction motors	Six GE 725B
Boiler	Babcock & Wilcox water-tube, oil-fired (Bunker C)
Boiler pressure	1,500–1,600 psi
Steam temperature	About 920°F
Boiler controls	Bailey Meter Company, automatic
Turbine speed	12,500 rpm
Reduction to generator	10:1
Main generator	Twin-armature DC
Auxiliary generator	3-phase 220 V AC (blowers and HEP)
Horsepower (rated)	2,500 per unit; 5,000 as a pair
Starting tractive effort	86,500 lbf
Continuous tractive effort	32,000–40,500 lbf (cooling-dependent)
Claimed maximum speed	125 mph (General Electric Review, February 1939)
Range (oil/water)	About 500–700 miles
Condenser	Yes (unique in North American steam service)
Braking	Dynamic / regenerative; resistor heat to feedwater
Head-end power	Yes
Fuel	Bunker C fuel oil

Figures compiled from GE contemporary claims, Union Pacific and Don Strack / UtahRails research, Brian Solomon, and roster notes (builder numbers). Claimed 125 mph and “twice the thermal efficiency” are manufacturer statements, not proven revenue-service results.

Union Pacific, April–June 1939

On the property the pair ran test and publicity trains out of Cheyenne: to Laramie, to Denver, and through to Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. They photographed well at the new Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal (opening ceremonies set for May 1, 1939). Acceleration was real. So were failures. On one Colorado–Omaha move both turbines quit; a 2800-class Pacific had to drag locomotives and train the rest of the way.

They did not take a regular passenger or freight assignment. UP used them as separate units on Omaha–Denver passenger trains in May, then coupled them again. Reliability, not peak horsepower, was the test they failed.

Omaha, April 27–29, 1939

The high-water mark of their public life was not a timetable. It was Hollywood. On April 24 they left Los Angeles eastbound with a Paramount special: the two turbines, fifteen cars of former Virginia & Truckee passenger equipment owned by the studio, and V&T 4-4-0 Dayton lettered as Union Pacific 58 for DeMille’s picture. The train reached Omaha April 27.

Golden Spike Days filled the city for the 70th anniversary of Promontory and the world premiere of Union Pacific (Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea, DeMille) on April 28 at the Omaha, Orpheum, and Paramount theaters. On April 28 the 4-4-0, both turbines, and the vintage cars stood on 11th Street between Douglas and Farnam. They stayed on display through April 29—the date of the photograph of locomotive No. 1 that opens this page.

In the first two weeks of May the pair made an eastern promotional swing for Paramount, including an exhibition for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, then came back to the railroad. On June 5–7 they took the movie special west to Los Angeles again and arrived 2 hours 26 minutes late. Road failures left one unit carrying the train; helpers were needed on Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada grades that did not normally see them. More failures on the return to Ogden, June 8–9.

Mechanical staff on the engines still had enough confidence at Ogden to put them alone on an 1,100-ton block of 18 refrigerator cars, the Cherry Fruit Special, across Utah, Wyoming, and Nebraska to Council Bluffs, arriving June 11. The usual Ogden–Council Bluffs schedule was 23 hours 10 minutes. This trip took 34 hours 20 minutes. Strack notes that those extra hours were delays not charged to the locomotives. It was still not a showing that would displace a Challenger or an E-unit.

Union Pacific returned both units to General Electric at Erie, via Chicago, on June 17, 1939. President W. M. Jeffers called it “necessary modification and/or reconstruction.”

After Union Pacific: New York Central, Great Northern, Scrap

GE and UP kept working. Cold-weather tests ran on the New York Central. A February 1941 report by a UP staff engineer was still hopeful. By the end of that year the railroad had Big Boys on order and coming, E-units in passenger service, and Electro-Motive’s FT freight diesel as a live alternative. On December 18, 1941, Jeffers told GE that Union Pacific was finished with the project. In December the company wrote off $73,276.73.

The two locomotives were repainted dark gray and numbered GE 1 and GE 2. In 1943 Great Northern leased them for the wartime power shortage and put them on short-haul freight between Spokane and Wenatchee, Washington. Crews called the machine “The Jeep.” Forman H. Craton of GE rode one west from Spokane on May 10, 1943, on train 27, a six-car mail train, and wrote it up later in Railroad magazine: they climbed out of Spokane easily, used the rheostatic brake on the descent, ran 70–75 mph in the dark, and arrived Wenatchee on time. Babcock & Wilcox’s Mosher, who had lived with the boilers from the beginning, corrected two minor failures so quickly that nobody else noticed. Craton thought the design enormously complex. He also thought it had run well that night.

By late 1943 the pair were back at Erie. Great Northern service is the last documented work. They were retired and cut up at the builder before World War II ended. No example survives. Overland Models later offered them in brass.

What They Left

Jeffrey W. Schramm called them “the most ambitious and technologically advanced locomotives to have traveled American rails to that point.” Alfred Bruce, writing as a Union Pacific historian, called the design “one of the most exceptional steam locomotives ever built.” Both judgments can be true and still leave the engines as a two-month demonstration that did not replace steam and did not beat the diesel.

What survived of the idea on Union Pacific was the turbine, not the boiler. After the war GE came back with a gas turbine burning Bunker C directly. Those GTELs—the 4,500-horsepower units and the later 8,500-horsepower “Big Blows”—were a different machine. They ran for years. The 1938 steam-electrics did not. The other American steam turbines (PRR S2 6-8-6, C&O M-1, N&W Jawn Henry) used different transmissions and none of them condensed. Those stories sit on the steam turbine overview. Nos. 1 and 2 remain GE’s only steam locomotives, and Union Pacific’s shortest-lived experiment in high-tech road power.

Sources

Strack, Don. “GE Steam Turbines,” in A History of Union Pacific Dieselization, 1934–1982, UtahRails.net (updated 2025)—delivery April 3, 1939; Omaha display April 27–29; return June 17, 1939; Jeffers letter December 18, 1941; write-off; GN 1943; Craton diary
Lee, Thomas R. “The Steam-Turbine-Electric Story,” The Streamliner 10, no. 2 (1995)
Solomon, Brian. GE and EMD Locomotives: The Illustrated History (2014); Union Pacific Railroad (2000)
Kratville, William, and Harold Ranks—quoted contemporary “replacement to steam / successor of diesels” line
General Electric Review, February 1939—125 mph and efficiency claims
Schramm, Jeffrey W. Out of Steam (2010)
Craton, Forman H., letter, Railroad magazine (1970), ride of May 10, 1943, Spokane–Wenatchee

Facebook X Pinterest Tumblr Reddit WhatsApp Messenger