This has probably been brought up but I’m too lazy too check back on previous postings.
I was talking with someone I know and she claimed that trucks only 2 miles per gallon whereas trains were more fuel efficient. Just how much miles/liters per gallon do trains get? Does it vary due to whatever horsepower the engine is?
Depends on the locomotive, running conditions, tonnage etc.
According to the AAR, one ton of freight can be moved 423 miles on one gallon of diesel.
Most OTR trucks get around 6 MPG that is were the fleets set them up for and based on that trucks move around 20-23 tons per load not to bad in real terms when you get down to it. Locomotives are gallons per hour and yes they are more efficent in the long haul but someplace in the supply chain there is a truck involved and that includes power generation who brought the wires to the jobsite so your house could be hooked up.
Using those numbers, it equates to 138 ton miles per gallon…about 1/4 th the fuel economy of rail…until you start trying to calculate the fuel required for switching etc. THat would be an exercise in numbercrunching! (lets see now, from a previous thread 300 Gallons per shift for a yard switcher is about 38 gallons per hour, how many times and for how long will an individual car require yard switcher services…ad nasuem…)
BUt I think most folks would agree that fuel economy is not the single driving factor for the decision of OTR vs Rail…there have been numerous threads about customer service, conveince, speed of service, etc.
Even with trucks involved on both ends of a move, it is clear that the carbon footprint of long distance by rail will be less than long distance truck. Even with the current expansion projects underway (BNSF Transcon, UP SUnsut route…) I doubt the RR could take all of the Long Distance trucks off of the highway…the capacity to do that wont be there in the forseeable future.
Makes me wonder, in a perverse sort of way, at what price for diesel fuel would drive 90% of the long distance trucking to the rails…and I dont think I want to see that, even if thre were more train watching opportunities!
Trucking fuel is about 5-8 mpg. In some areas of the USA, I calculate against current fuel burn rate in Gallons PER HOUR in real time or nearly so. Especially in Mountain country.
Usually I look at truck fuel in terms of days remaining. When 300 gallons are filled into those two tanks, I get two different results depending on summer or winter and situation that week. Hard 24/7 team driving, that 300 gallons is good for roughly a day and a half… call it 40 hours before just under half tanks. Or thinking about 1200 miles in summer and 700 in winter between fill.
Sometimes you might have 20 to 30 gallons burned in about an hour for each mountain you climb. For only 24 ton of freight or so that isnt very reasonable against a train. Dont forget River Tow Barges and Ocean Shipping carries a heck of alot more stuff per gallon of fuel burned or mile traveled.
Miles per gallon can be compared between trucks and trains as a point of interest, but not as a measure of hauling efficiency. For that you need to compare gallons per ton hauled. Just guessing, I suppose one typical road locomotive working at full throttle might burn several gallons per mile. But when you consider the tonnage being moved, railroads are far more fuel efficient than road vehicles. But still there are tradeoffs. One of the drawbacks of a train is that you need a track.
The fuel economy advantage of trains depends of moving dense, heavy things at somewhat slow speeds. This takes maximum advantage of the low rolling resistance of steel wheels on steel rails, having a minimum tare weight relative to the load carried and a minimum of air resistance. It also takes advantage of the higher load limits of most railroads relative to highways.
When you start moving light fluffy things quickly, the fuel economy advantage of trains starts to diminish. One kind of light fluffy thing with a lot of air drag is a truck trailer carried piggyback. You have the tare weight disadvantage of not only the trailer but of the flatcar or spine car carrying the trailer, weight of the locomotive, along with adverse aerodynamics, especially if you want truck-competitive speed. There are a lot of numbers I have seen regarding piggyback, but I have seen figures running about a 2:1 fuel economy advantage of piggyback relative to trucking, but then again, your mileage may vary, especially with the adverse factors I have mentioned.
The most adverse light fluffy things people want to move by rail are passengers. Passengers “cube out” long before load limits are reached, and the weights of trains per revenue passenger seat vary, but they can be multiples of either cars, buses, or airplanes. Part of the weight issue is the FRA’s “battleship on rails” approach to passenger safety, which may not be misplaced given the mixed operation of freight and passengers and the issues with grade crossing collisions. Another part is the amenities people come to expect from trains – it is widely assumed that a train will offer much more space than a bus or a plane, but the amount of space you offer per seat is a business decision much as the density of seats on airplanes.
Passenger trains can be streamlined to take advantage of the “drafting effect” of one train car following another – streamlining gets a lot of attention in
I’ll take the Battleship any day.
Keep in mind it aint the smash that kills people, it’s the Tele-scoping. I hope never to see something like that happen in real life, dicing passengers and crew to a puree.
I would hate to ride a swaying superliner at 150+ mph be what I call a puke generator.
Light fluffy things as people require tender loving care. Or at least someone to take a moment, toss them a case of frozen food and make a microwave availible. Nuking that little dinner hardly impacts horsepower.
Now I recall my spouse nuking dinner in the tractor at highway speed and having to increase engine RPM a few hundred feeding that alternator to maintain voltage in the entire rig. A genset would have been a MUCH better choice.
However the owner of the truck would rather replace a fried alternator several times a year rather than spend 5000 hard earned revenue dollars for a second motor that generates heat, A/C and house electricity.
The corridor is mostly nuclear powered by overhead.
It is testamony to our unwillingness to spend a single dollar in better track to enable big speeds over 80 mph. We need that dollar to impress wall street or profits.
Dont worry about the freight cars and choo choo. Yes they are heavy, but no where as near heavy as a fully loaded one. In fact I think if a bunch of these cars run in slack or run it out the forces acting on the choo choo will be significant.
20 years ago these were the averages: An SD40-2 in good repair would burn about 168 gallons per hour in notch 8, and about 9 gph in low idle. Also, my sister could eat half a thanksgiving turkey before anyone could say “amen.”
JSGREEN wrote:
Makes me wonder, in a perverse sort of way, at what price for diesel fuel would drive 90% of the long distance trucking to the rails…and I dont think I want to see that, even if thre were more train watching opportunities!
I am a truck driver over 19 years & approx 2 Million Miles Experience, and in my opinion, with the exception of perishables and High Value loads such as electronics, I think that anything moving more than 1000 miles at a guess, though this number can vary, it SHOULD GO BY RAIL (not that I want to see that much freight go by rail) BUT the reason it doesn’t is that:
EVERYBODY WANTS TO ORDER TOMORROW, and GET IT YESTERDAY
Nobody wants to plan ahead or wait for anything, RAIL is CHEAPER, TRUCKS are FASTER, that and a truck can predict much more accurately when it will arrive.
Doug
When I am driving my car I am concerned with how much it costs to get ME to where I want to go. So I am concerned with the miles per gallon of the vehicle I am using to move ME. Well, in reality it is not miles per gallon, it is $$$ to move ME where I want to go at my convenience.
I’d be willing to forget my car altogether if the city bus or a train was in my garage waiting to go when I darn well feel like it and it went to exactly where I want to go following the route that I want to take (today), including any diversions I suddenly think of and there are no rude dorks on the bus that smell of tobacco, drugs, booze, urin, other body order or excessive body lotion/perfume/cologne/after-shave, and are not listening to stupid rinkydink music so loud it is hurting my ears (even though I do not have the earbuds in MY ears) and don’t otherwise make a complete or even minor nuisance of themselves.
But if I were wanting to move tons of goods, I would be much more concerned with how much it cost to move the goods. i.e.: suppose my truck can haul 10 tons of ‘X’ for $100 worth of fuel and my train can haul 100 tons of ‘X’ for $900 worth of fuel. If I had 100 tons of ‘X’ to move I’d prefer the train. If I only had 10 tons to move, then I might prefer the truck because the fuel economy of the train might not be proportional such that it might cost more than 10% of the cost of the fuel to move 10% of the full train load of ‘X’.
Of course, this presupposes that all other factors are the same… How long it takes to traverse the distance and whether either mode of transportation can leave and arrive at the same source and destination in a timely manner and whether X arrives in the correct condition, etc. All those things (and many more) must come into play to decide which is the most economical method.
“Miles per gallon” is meaningless if you don’t take all the other factors int
Hear hear ye! The truth and gospel of a mass transit vet!
There was a very old Theme Park in the Dutch Country that used Monorail as a sort of a novelty. I understand that the orginal monorails has either been sold or put up for sale after a fire.
Those monos move alot of people silently and without notice from nearby persons.
If every street in every city and town had a mono to move people connected by longer haul monos (Aka Maglev) we might actually get something done rather well.
But alas! That City bus isnt for the Government that make it happen … oh no. It’s for the people who cannot for a variety of reasons cannot get around in a car of thier own.
Probably the best mileage will be on the Florida East Coast withan almost dead flat mainline. According to the article in last month’s issue, it only takes 0.75 HP/ton to get to 60 MPH. This works out to 80 gross ton-miles per horsepower-hour, and a modern locomotive engine can easily do better than say 0.375 lb/hp-hr for fuel consumption, which works out to 20 hp-hr/gal. Multiplying this all out gives about 1600 gross ton-miles per gallon or maybe 800 to 1000 net ton miles per gallon.
The advantage of fuel economy has always been the money saved. But today, saving the environment has emerged as a second advantage. Despite the fact that it can be much harder to measure than saving money, the environmental objective offers the advantage of reaping society’s accolades. It is up to the recipient to figure out a way to turn the accolades into cash.
However fuel usage is measured and compared, there is no doubt that the low friction resulting from the big investment of a railroad track yields a tremendous advantage in fuel economy. It has been long shown that the big investment is justified in part by the cash advantage of that fuel economy.
I have seen two new TV commercials targeting the second advantage of fuel economy, which is the saving of the environment. One is for America’s freight railroads, and the other is for NS. The first one makes the point rather well, but the NS piece is a bit strange. Although it is a costly, high profile ad, I would guess that 75% of those viewing it would not get the point. It is way too clever by half with its personified plastic gasoline cans silently expressing their votes for or against fuel consumption.
[(-D][tup]
With the exception of the FEC example above, the fuel usage between different trains and different trucks could vary so much, that there’s probably not an easy comparison available anywhere.
I’ll have to look at that-- FEC claims a GP40-2 can do 60 mph with 4000 trailing tons on the level?
(Okay, I looked-- they don’t say what kind of train. It’s unlikely 0.75 hp/ton can get an intermodal to 60 mph; on page 36 two 4300-hp SD70s top out at 51 mph (or maybe 52-53) with a 10000-ft-but-unknown-tonnage train. On the other hand, put those two SD70s on eighty 143-ton rock loads and for all we know maybe they can manage 60 mph-- but I’m guessing not.)