Here’s some freelancing fun to get everyone thinking creatively: It’s the year 2008, the United States, along with Israel, has gone to war with Iran and oil prices are hitting record highs daily, impacting the cost of transportation severly. In an effort to protect the economy of North America, the governments of the USA and Canada are offering grants and subsidies to railroads working on alternatives to diesel power. In the midst of all of this, gas prices have climbed over $3.50 a gallon and with no end to the increases in sight, people have returned to passenger rail (especially commuter rail) in droves putting pressure on regional and national systems. So modelers, how do your railroads respond to this? Do they take the government money and attempt to innovate their way out? Do they go to all tier-III power and reap the benefits of the increased fuel economy? Or do they do something completely different? And how do passenger lines cope with the sudden increase in ridership? Cheers! ~METRO
They don’t do much of anything. A war with Iran would last a few weeks at most. Fuel prices would be back down in a year or two.
Long term would be a different story. My vote would be for the eventual development of hydrogen powered locomotives.
Energy crisis? What energy crisis? There is no energry crisis within a hundred miles of the Moose Bay Railroad. Of course, it’s set in 1967.
I suspect we would take a close look at modern steam locomotives since a war with Iran would drag on for years…
In the 1950’s, some railroads proposed and actually experimented with nuclear powered locomotives.
In the latter part of the 1980’s, a company called the American Coal Enterprises (ACE) headed by Ross Rowland adapted a C&O 2-6-6-4 to newer technologies and ran experiments in the hope of generating more interest in reverting to steam power.
Nothing ever came of these experiments. Despite the cost of diesel fuel today, it’s still cheaper than steam powered locomotives in the amount of work extracted from the energy source, and can you imagine the public outcry by environmentalists if any railroad ever attempted to run a nuclear powered engine?
Nuclear power for railroad use may be feasible at this point. As far as the environmentalist groups go, when the time come that the government gives the OK for railroads to use nuclear power for motive power, the complaints of the environmentalists will have to take a distant back seat.
A nuclear-powered locomotive would produce no greenhouse gasses. You might find that some of the environmentalists were actually on your side.
Nuclear powered locos would be great except for one thing…accidents. I can just see a major city unable to use a certain radii for 100 years because of contamination. We need to develop solar power, or H2 power, or mag lev.
Nuke powered trains eh - would give new meaning to GE U-boats.
U = Uranium - New model GE U238 ? [:-^]
There’s an easy way to make a nuclear powered train relatively safe:
Use the nuclear powerplant to energize overhead wire and run heavy electric trains! That way, all the glowy radiation-y stuff is waaay over there and the trains themselves are magnificently quiet, don’t smoke or spew exhaust, and work just fine.
Or you could power them with solar, wind, geothermal, or any number of alternate technologies–modern nuclear power is just a fairly efficient way of doing so.
Alternately: Use vegetable oil in place of diesel.
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_svo.html
The original Diesel engine ran on peanut oil.
What about steamers or internal combustion engines run on compressed natural gas or CNG? I don’t think it would be too hard to modify a steamer to use a CNG burner instead of a traditional firebox would it? Also there’s the added bonus of not having ash or the pollution of coal to worry about. My bet is biodiesel and large scale electrification would take place. I can see some steamers being used in limited capacity (mainly high-speed intermodal and other light & fast freight) but the majority of railroading will be still under electric motors of some kind, be they through pantograph, third rail or diesel electric. Cheers! ~METRO
The very first diesel engine was fired by coal dust. It was used at an ice plant in Germany.
Excuse me, where is the local railyard? Just follow the smell of the McDonalds french fries, you can’t miss it. LOL
LNG and Biodiesel both produce greenhouse gasses. This is a problem, and there’s no sense building a “new” infrastructure which keeps messing up the atmosphere. (I’m a scientist, by the way, not a Liberal-with-a-capital-L or a tree-hugger.) Instead, we should be looking at using the vast empty spaces of the American desert to collect solar energy. No pollution, totally renewable and, after the initial investment, basically free. That power can be used for anything, but installing catenary over major rail lines and transitioning to electric locomotives would sure make a lot of sense, particularly in urban areas where the pollution has an immediate effect on the local populace.
Yes, our solar collector technology isn’t “there yet” and we’d get more bang for the buck by waiting 10 years until it gets better. On the other hand, the same can be said of computer technology, and if we took that same attitude back at the beginning of the PC revolution, we’d all still be connecting green-screen dumb terminals up to PDP-11’s. The time to start is now.
The sad reality is that we will never see a resurgence of the “traditional” steam locomotive, it is not realistic for todays age. All of the valve gear creates maintenance hassles that drive up the cost. No matter what is used to fire it, it still takes time to get all of that water up to steam making temperature, a diesel has a starter that can bring it to life and ready to go almost instantly. Keeping a steam loco “idling” and ready to go like in the old days also adds fuel use and more personnel. And the heat (energy) efficiency of a steam loco is just not as high as some of the other options available. I feel that the only new steam that we would see on the rails would be some form of turbine. I can envision Jawn Henry and Chessie style turbines to some degree, but straight electrics would be more likely in this day and age. I would like to see GG1s, Little Joes, and the big Virginian locos come back into vogue, with updated electronics of course. I could also see GE and EMD offering the current line of locos with pantographs added and a modified electrical system to go back and forth between power sources, kind of like a modern FL9.
Biodiesel recycles carbon products already in the “carbon cycle.” Therefore it does not increase the total active carbon dioxide in the cycle the way digging fuels out of the ground does.
Although atmospheric chemistry is not my primary focus, as a dynamic meteorologist I keep tabs on these things.
Folks are doing research right now into producing a Kerosene-like product from coal that can be turned into diesel or jet fuel. This, of course, contributes to the greenhouse gas problem, but the US has plenty of coal and wouldn’t have to rely on the Middle East for it.
It’s not unrealistic to expect coal-oil locomotives someday soon, but they’d look like modern diesels. They’re just so much more efficient than steam, as much as I love steam.
Exactly…and if the infrastructure is in place for solar collectors, it becomes easier to replace the “not there yet” solar collectors with the “we’ve arrived” ones in a decade or so. Funny, people were saying “a decade or so” about solar collectors back in the 1980s.
Putting solar panels in the desert is a start, but there are plenty of suburban “deserts” that could use them too: one of my favorite solar applications here in California is the use of solar panels to cover parking lots. They provide shade for the cars as well as power.
The Western Railway Museum at Rio Vista Junction has a stretch of electrified track that is largely unimproved from the days when wooden-bodied interurbans ran its length, except for the stately shapes of windmill generators. They are modern, to be sure, but it seems somehow appropriate for antique electric trains to trundle along in the shadow of giant electricity-generating windmills.
But no engine now can run on 100% biodiesel. It’s all a mix. FOrd Motor Company only recommends no more than 5% biodiesel. To me, that makes biodiesel pretty much useless. Until solar power is harnessed completely, we’ll be at the mercy of supply and demand.
I’d never really thought about that. How close is the “biodiesel cycle” or the similar “bio-ethanol” cycle to steady-state? That is, plants will take in carbon dioxide and sunlight, and release oxygen while building other carbon molecules. Using those plants as a fuel will then break down the carbon molecules, creating carbon dioxide and releasing heat energy. Do we get pretty much the same amount of carbon dioxide out as we put in? I suspect the energy yield is a lot lower, but at least it’s something.
Well, no, your factory-supplied gas engine can’t run on either biodiesel, or ethanol, or used onion-ring oil from Arby’s, either. However, I think that the much-maligned Hummer (MilSpec version, not the Yuppified model) is designed to run on any of them, at least for a tank or two. So, once we decide on which bio-fuel we’re going to use, then we need to build the right engines for it.
I would just use an energizer battery for all my engines and they will just keep going and going and going… This topic was so stupid by the way