YES, my November TRAINS came in Friday’s mail and I read the subject article while trackside yesterday at my beloved Eola Yard in the afternoon.
For the most recent available year BN has 5,790 locoomotives, and the annual locomotive repair and maintenance charges are $538,253,000. [2004 ANNUAL REPORT FORM R-1, SCHEDULE 210]
Say, for the purposes of discussion, traction motor maintenance and repair is 10% of that number, $53,000,000. That strikes me as high, nearly $93,000 per unit, but this is a hypothetical to determine ballpark feasibility.
If the fleet was all AC, the extra costs of electrical equipment and carrying charges at 8% over 8 years adds $498,000,000 per year to the “cost” of the fleet over DC, in order to save up to $53,000,000 per year in repair costs. The extra cost of the AC locomotives is approximately ten times the possible savings on traction motor maintenance. You can adjust this accordingly if you think the traction motor maintenance cost is higher or lower than 10% of overall maintenance and repair costs.
Over the 8 years, an all-AC fleet would cost BN nearly $4 billion more in extra capital requirements over an all-DC fleet. The opportunity cost of the AC investment is $2.56 billion.
Insofar as the partly hypothetical parameters here are concerned, traction motor maintenance savings are not a justification for the expenditure. A performance metric that reads to the effect of “goes real well at slow speeds,” is difficult to quantify and justify in a network where slower speed reduces capacity and increases other operating costs and capital needs.
This change alone would drop the Operating Ratio from 86% to nearly 91%.
Clearly, any use of an AC locomotive would necessarily be limited by economic feasibility, rather than
Well, since by your own admission, “but this is a hypothetical…”, everything else is just a boilerplate. Find the real numbers, plug them in, and then the diccussion might be meaningful. Until then, its a great big game of What IF.
Here’s an Idea…What If we talk in general terms until we actually find some reasonable numbers?
Just my [2c]
Well, I just love “general terms” because anybody can say just about anything and it is meaningless. The hypothetical is based on something slightly better than just “thin air.”
The last motive power study that involved maintenance specifics that I participated in was 32 years ago, but my recollection is that the diesel engine constituted approximately 70% of the maintenance and repair requirements of an SD-40-2 locomotive, which is what we were looking at. Brakes and rigging were about 10% and “other electrical” about 10%. I don’t specifically recall that the DC traction motors were a big item at all, but what’s left is around 10%.
If the economic advantage is solely in traction motor repair costs, the “break-even” on AC would require that the DC traction motors cost approximately 93% of total locomotive maintenance and repair costs.
That’s not reasonable.
That’s something you will never find. Placing a locomotive order worth hundreds of million dollars is a complicated drawn out negotiation. The only people who know what it really costs GE to produce a DC vs. AC locomotive is GE, and they aren’t going to release their internal accounting to the public. CSX isn’t going to release internal costs either, so you guys have no choice but to play “What if” as to why we assign our locomotive fleet the way we do.
I think that there are other factors involved, lost time while tractions motors are exchanged, extra inventory of spare traction motors, the fact that either the train must be lightened or extra locomotives must be assigned. The whole run should be run through a simulator with things like cycle times, locomotive utilization, expected fuel burn, crew costs, etc. taken into account. I know that BN reported that 3 SD70MACs would save on transit time from the PRB to Houston via the Denver route versus a 5 unit set of SD40-2s inspite of having 3000 less horsepower, also the SD40-2s needed a 2-unit helper to get over the Palmer Lake grade. While the SD70MACs would just lug it out. the time adding and removing the helper would almost offset the higher speed.
CSX’s large investment in DC GEVOs is all about Tony Ingram’s view on motive power.
A.) He intensely dislikes EMD for some reason.
B.) He doesn’t believe in AC.
C.) He can’t see buying 2 locomotives, when he could buy 3 for the same price. (When you need to replace 500 locomotives and you have the credit rating of toliet paper, this is a big concern).
Nick
That’s not true. He’s just smart enough to realize GE now builds a better, more profitable to run product.
That’s not true. He didn’t believe in AC for NS operating conditions. Our conditions are much more severe in places. We will always have AC in our fleet.
That’s nothing new. We all feel the same way. Like I said, don’t assume we paid the “2 for 3” price for our large fleet of CW44ACs.
Why do so many of you on this site pass your opinions off as fact?
Without some sort of economic benift of the AC traction technoligy the odds of selling the additional expense of the engines to the naturally consevative railroad managment would have been an uphill battle.
They would have never gotten beyond the demonstrator phase. Railroads are not known for buying new technoligy just because it’s trendy.
I really dont know much about locomotives, let alone electrical engineering. I can only report what I see.
The AC units on the heavy coal trains really dig down deep and pull. I personally have walked with a 18000 ton coal train at less than 1mph til it reached the summit (or in this case the top of the hill here in Valparaiso). Incredible pulling power at low speeds.
I also have watched stalled trains get moving on the same hill and watched the locomotives vibrate like crazy when taking off. So much that I moved back…way back.
ed
My recollection from the early 90s was that traction motor cost was about 1/3 of the total maintenance and overhaul cost for a typical DC locomotive. It varied from road to road depending on operating circumstances from a low of about 25% to roughly 50%.
It is rare for a DC road locomotive to make it to it’s first power assembly change out (about 4-5 years) with more than about half if it’s original motors still under it. As I recall, the Conrail SD80MACs still had all their original motors under them 3 years in. Might have had one or two invertors changed out.
The work done by the AAR ad-hoc committee that wa
GP40,
What position do hold with CSX?
What insider information is CSX telling you that they are not telling me? I’m pretty well plugged into the CSX grapvine.
Why do you assume my statement of costs are not correct? I’m relying on published costs. You’re assuming a backdoor deal was made, but you can’t prove it.
Nick
After having read the neat article in the Nov. Trains about CSX’s deployment of “heavy” locomotives plus some comments in this thread, few things come to mind.
CSX certainly has some spots where TE rules the day and I can see why they’d want some of those “heavies”. But, CSX has quite a bit of flat land, high speed territory (NJ to Chicago and Alexandria to FL come to mind) where AC units would be an extravigance. CSX could theoretically play the BNSF’s game of a segregated fleet to it’s advantage, but they’d really have to take a more disciplined approach to motive power assignment.
I haven’t seen anything ever happen on CSX that approaches that level of discipline. CSX is notorious for not being able to get it’s good ideas fleshed out and implemented.
Regardless of the price you pay for AC vs DC units, once you have them in the fleet, that is a sunk cost and your focus should be on maximizing their productivity in terms of HP and TE and minimized fuel costs. In most cases when you have a mixed fleet, that will imply segregating them matching routes, schedules and traffic to locomotive type.
The CSX article had no mention of any track force or ride quality testing of those “heavies” at 70 mph. Since CSX is using them on vans, too, I wonder what the impact (pun intended) of those “heavies” is on the track structure or crew person’s butt at speed.
I suspect that “GP40-2” is telling us that CSXT’s locomotive-acquisition decisions are typically made in response to proposals from the manufacturers. Basically the manufacturers decide what features they can–or cannot–offer; and, in response to the proposals, CSXT decides what financial arrangements it can–or cannot–make to obtain the features that it needs and that the manufacturers can provide. In other words, everything is subject to some degree of negotiation.
Jay Potter
Most recently, CSXT’s “more disciplined approach” involved (1) resolving GE and EMD software incompatibilities so that mixed consists of AC4400CWs and SD70MAC/MAC-T1s could be used in low-speed coal loading and then (2) acquiring ES44DCs, which enabled increasing numbers of SD70MAC-T1s to be assigned to coal service.
Jay Potter
CSXT considered both ride quality and impact on track structure. The former is more a function of truck design than unit weight; and the latter is more a function of the high levels of tractive effort that can be produced at low speeds than a function of unit weight alone.
Jay Potter
I hope they can keep the assignements straight. It’s pretty disheartening to see ACs mixed with Dash 2 on vans and those “dog’s breakfast” locomotive consists roaming around all over. It makes for interesting railfanning, but it’s kind of depressing from a professional’s point of view. They’re nothing better than seeing locomotives doing exactly what they were built to do.
EMD’s HTC’s weren’t particularly wonderful at 70 mph under 390,000# locomotives. I can’t imagine GE’s version is much better. What does GE do for primary lateral suspension on their Hi-adhesion truck?
In general, what makes for a good ride (stiff primaries, soft secondaries) makes for lousy adhesion.
Perhaps it’s a bit of the down side of Diesels not having “home bases.” Steamers rarely freely roamed the system. Even for long distance trains, the locomotives were often changed at certain points. And each locomotive had a home - to which it would regularly return. Thus a locomotive best suited to the mountains would rarely be seen on the flatlands, etc, and so on.
Today it’s not at all unusual to see run-through power hundreds of miles from it’s home rails - something you would never have seen in steam days.
Like most specific design issues, that’s way beyond my level of understanding. However the GE truck at issue is the Generation I steerable truck, not the HiAd truck.
Jay Potter