You can download the Kindle eBook versions of R. G. LeTourneau’s Overland Trains: a complete history for free on Amazon from December 25th to December 29th, 2022. Head over to Amazon and download the eBook completely free of charge – https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BFL91FX6.
There were three known nuclear powered Overland Trains concepts. I have included two free pages from my book talking about these concepts. enjoy pages 292 and 293 below.
When the Army sold the TC-497 for surplus, it ended up making its way to a local surplus and salvage yard – Jet Sales Company. The two power cars were cut up and sold as scrap, while the trailers were sold and sent to Nome, AK for a special dredging machine called Gold Digger. The story around Gold Digger is extensive in my book if you want to learn more. However, the Control Car, or the primary driver car, was saved.
The Control Car remained at Jet Sales Company until it was purchased by the Yuma Heritage Center for preservation. When the TC-497 was sold, a 3′ wide, 5′ tall cabinet held a variety of original manuals that were included in the Overland Train. Fortunately, we were able to save these manuals. The outside covers are in pretty bad shape, but the interior pages are near mint! Thank you Jensen.
I received a cache of gently read LeTourneau NOW newsletters in the mail yesterday. These company newsletters were published by R. G. LeTourneau. Inc. and mailed to whomever wanted to read it free of cost. The date range for these newsletters closely aligns with the Overland Trains development, including the Firestone 120x48x68 tires. I have scanned the December 1, 1953 issue and embedded it if you would like to read or download the issue.
I chose to self-publish my book because it gave me full autonomy for format, page count, and tone. One of the limitations by self-publishing with Amazon is that small businesses won’t see my book in their catalogs – Amazon calls this Expanded Distribution. Unfortunately, using this method I would have to increase my book price to over $62; that is too high in my opinion.
The alternative is that I order Author’s Copies and have Amazon ship them out to these small businesses. I end up making around $4 a book when I sell it this way. It’s not a money maker by any means. But, it does the job of getting the information into the hands of folks to read. That’s amazing…
I completed two of these orders in the last two days. You should see copies of the book at the Gregg County Historical Society and Historical Construction Equipment Association.
If you are a small business, online store, or other low-volume retailer and would like copies of my book for sale, please get ahold of me at mark@nwlinux.com. Let’s talk.
I made a few corrections to the paperback book and the eBook this morning. A reader messaged me about the coordinates being incorrect for the Monster Syncline – I omitted a 4. I capitalized “cap,” where it should have been “Cap,” Lastly, I edited the Copyright page to reflect more current data. All in all, very minor changes.
The updates are in review and should be published and available within three days (November 30, 2022).
Book available now on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BFL91FX6.
When I started out writing this book, it was never about profitability. In fact, I spent more money on buying distribution rights, travel to Texas, website server/web application firewall, file storage, and other electronics than I will ever make back. With that said, here are a few statistics about the book sales and net profits.
I started selling the book in paper and eBook format in September 2022. Since then, readers have purchased 128 books, with 17 purchased as eBooks.
Total sales have net me $595.77
This is about what I would expect from a niche’ book such as this. As the author, I can purchase 999 books at printing cost, which is about $30 per book. I bought 20 books at cost for a total of around $600. Many of these I have given away or will mail to folks that helped me out during the writing process.
An archive video recently released buy the U.S. Army Transportation Museum shows several logistics train concepts, including the Sno-Train. The video, created by The United States Army Transportation Research Command, shows several early train concepts, including a small dozer with covered wagons with wooden wheels.
Later concept drawings closely mirrored LeTourneau’s Tournamotive Trackless Train concept, which was his first.
The video shows four concept drawings similar in design to LeTourneau’s. The first two drawings depict wheeled trailers with a tracked control car. The later two drawings in the video show a wheeled control car.
The video concludes with a little over a minute of the Sno-Train maneuvering over snowy terrain near a body of water. The following images were captured from the video, which was likely filmed in Houghton, MI, USA. The Sno-Train was in Houghton for testing at the Keweenaw Field Station of Snow Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE) from March 1956 to the end of May 1956.
All images in this blog post were captured from U.S. Army Public Domain video posted by the U.S. Army Transportation Museum unless otherwise noted.
Overland Trains 