The engines & the corridor/hangar are in a separate Blend file. You can append the engines in your own project file by appending the different groups for 2.79 or via the collections in 2.8

Each engine with the exhaust is on its own layer/collection for ease of navigation.

To animate the exhaust effects you can go into the node/shader editor while having the exhaust object selected. Then you will see some nodes colored orange. These nodes you can modify/animate as the description of the nodes instructs. You can of course adjust the colors as well. Adjusting other nodes or values might break the look of the exhaust shader, or you might stumble on an even cooler effect. So before you experiment, safe the original first.

Concerning render times: One FHD render of one singular engine & exhaust in space took around 2 minutes to render on a RTX 2070 with 400 samples. So its possible to create animations with these engines. Just plug them into your spaceships and you are good to go.