THEN & NOW


The Army wanted to do the exact opposite—haul tons of gear into wilderness where there was essentially nothing.


mid-1950s. Capable of hauling 45 tons, the vehicle was successful enough that the Army wanted one that was bigger and better—an overland train that could be as long as the Army needed it to be.


LCC 1’s successor, the eventual Overland Train, was a monster version of the LCC 1. LeTourneau’s TC-497 Overland Train Mark II boasted a three-story tall, six-wheeled cab—in images, it’s reminiscent of an air traffic control tower—and also had 10-foot- tall tires. It could haul 150 tons, measured nearly three football fields in length, and could travel about 400 miles at about 20 miles per hour.


Te idea for a nuclear powerplant for the vehicle in 1961 made sense: Te vehicle was enormous and adding more power would enable endless expansion. A nuclear power plant could gener- ate power for the electric motors that drove each of the wheels indefinitely.


By that time, the Army had been looking at small-scale nuclear power plants, and the idea of nuclear power may have been part of


a larger strategy. In the May 1961 issue, Lt. Gen. Arthur Trudeau, then the Army chief of research and development, noted that “Unfortunately, the extent to which nuclear plants can be minia- turized appears to be limited—and the cost of reactors is still too high. Yet, we can approach the optimum if we utilize a nuclear- powered, cross-country vehicle comparable to the overland train as a mobile supply point. (See Army R&D Newsmagazine, Janu- ary, Page 10.)”


VERTICAL LIFT TAKES OFF Alas, it was not to be. LeTourneau delivered the final version, with gas turbine engines, to the Army at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, where it stayed. According to online sources, the cab is still there. Te rest was sold off.


As to its predecessor, according to an article in the UK’s Daily Mail, “Te Sno-Buggy’s massive tires were later used on the famous Bigfoot monster truck, after the owner bought them in a Seattle junkyard for $1,000.”


Te thing that killed the overland train wasn’t any failure of the Army, the vehicle or LeTourneau, which is now part of Komatsu LTD. It was the Army’s simultaneous work in vertical lift. Te Sikorsky CH-54 Tarhe twin-engine heavy-life helicopter could do the job that the Overland Train was intended to do, but could do it better, cheaper and faster. Its civilian counterpart, the S-64 Skycrane, first flew in 1962.


—STEVE STARK


THE BIGGEST WHEEL


A LeTourneau LCC-1 Sno-Train carrying supplies near Camp Century, an Arctic United States military scientific research base in Greenland, June 1959. The base is a network of trenches dug out of the snow and ice and lined with corrugated steel arches. Camp Century was later found to be a cover project for Project Iceworm, a secret plan to install nuclear missile launch sites under the Greenland ice sheet. Both Camp Century and Project Iceworm were abandoned in 1967 when it emerged that the Greenland ice was not stable enough for the structures to be viable in the long term. (Photo by U.S. Army/Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/ Getty Images)


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