I guess railroad electrification reached it’s peak in the 1940’s.or maybe sooner than that.Why did railroads get away from that??? During these times of global warming & green house gases,shouldnt the railroads also be looking for better ways of moving there payloads???Europe & the far east have trais runing on magnets & elctric power,it’s time we get away from belching diesel locomotives and get some research started to geting some cleaner stuff on the rails.what’s EMD or GE doing,anyone know??? Easter
WHY?
Are you made out of endless financial resources? (Catenary ain’t cheap bubba)
All you are doing is moving the emissions point source using electric over diesel?
How long till you get your investment back?
You think the same amount of current made at the plant gets to your catenary out in the boondocks?[(-D][(-D][(-D]
Reality check!
Seems to me, that railroads switched from electri to diesel-electric for a reason. Diesel-electric was more cost effective. It still is, or the railroads would be stringing up catenary wire.
Electricity isn’t free. It has to be made by turning a generator or alternator. To turn that you need hydropower in a turbine or steam. Steam is made by burning a fossil fuel ( coal, oil gas, etc.). When you use the fossil fuel you do not get 100% conversion to energy dues to friction and process losses. If you took the fuel and used it directly to move something the efficiency is much higher than converting the heat generated to steam and then to electricity. electricity is the highest cost power there is. Now add the cost of catenary, reapir costs when you have an accident or storm damage and it it doesn;t take long to see why CR got out of the electric engine business. In addition you need high usage (corridor). As a PRR efficianado I can tell you you can;t justify it today unless you are Amtrak and you got it handed to you by the feds for about 2 cents on the dollar when PC collapsed. I susect if the PRR was around today its electric operations would be cut back to the tunnels in New York like it was originally.
During the 1970’s energy crisis, UP thoughly evaluated the electrification of the Ogden - Green River line. As far as candidates for electrifiction, this one has most all the pluses, high traffic density, approximately balanced uphill/downhill traffic (dynamic braking on the downhill helps power the uphill), access to the electrical grid, and management support. UP even owned the coal that would fire the added generating capacity. They went so far as to install a couple of test sections of catenary to evaluate weather and radio communications impacts. GE was even pushing a great new electric locomotive for UP to buy.
In the end, even with all the plus factors, UP said “No!” and maybe even “Not ever” if you believe some of the rumors. Electrification simply cost too much. Still does.
dd
Electrification: Great for high-traffic lines, but it becomes highly uneconomical when the business dries up. See for example the many former Pennsy lines here in PA that still have the catenary support posts next to the tracks, but no wires over them any longer.
It depends on what you have to pay for oil as well as your traffic density. For example in Europe Electrification rules with the exeption of the UK because it is cheaper than using oil. Think in that context oil has to be imported and is taxed to the hilt. It skews the economics. Obviously UP in the 70’s was concerned about the future price of oil that they strung up a bit of 25kv 60hz to test for things like signalling interfence.
I like belching diesel locomotives. And, right now, I could use a little global warming.
Seriously, it’s too much of a risk. Electrification has been studied. I’ts a “bet the company” propositiion. If things don’t work out the right way 10 years down the road, the company will be taken under financially. Not a good bet.
In Europe, the trains may be electrically powered, but that freight is going down the highway behind a diesel tractor.
A belching diesel is an inefficent diesel. The best thing the rail idustry to do to reduce it’s CO2 emmissions and reduce its fuel bills is to keep a up to date and well maintained fleet. Compare fuel consumption/emmissions between an SD40-2 and a SD70e or a U30c to a EVO series engine and you get the picture.
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Remember that the New Haven reelectified while in bankrupcy to SAVE MONEY! Admittadly, most of the electrification was subsidized by the Connecticut and New York subisidization of commuter service, but they did have to put back the wire between the New Haven RR. Station and Ceder Hill Yard, also at the Oak Point Yard in the Bronx, and along the Long Island railroad’s Bay Ridge branch to the car floats at Bat Ridge, owned by the LIRR but operate and maintained by the NH. And they bought the ex-Virginian-N&W electrics.
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The problem with the PRR electrification is that traffic patterns shifted. The main line was the corridor, and once Conrail was running the operation, the freight was shifted off the corridor onto the CNJ-Reading-B&O line. So what remained were really branches. Sure, the Harrisburgh electrification was main line, but the freights ran through to Pittsburgh, bypassing the Enola change point. And all New England freigth was relocated via Selkirk and the Boston and Albany, with neither the West Shore River Line nor the B&A electrified.
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Some day the UP main line will be electrified. When technology advances to the point where a combination straight-electric-diesel-electric costs perhaps only 20% more that a pure diesel. Then it will make sense. What I mean by straight electric in this sense is one capable of picking up power from 25,000Volts 60Hz (cylces-per-second) AC. The current dual-power electrics used by LIRR, Metro North and Amtrak are all third rail dc electrics, and that is relatively easy. What are needed are more efficient and more compact transformers, and the limitation on compactness is heat build-up. I am sure GE is working on it.
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And the two most heavily traveled British long-distance main lines (if anything in the UK can be called long-distance) ARE electrified. A
Everything all you guys say makes a lot of sense,but why do you have to burn fossil fuels to make electricity? What’s wrong with nuclear plants to generate electric power? Easter
The return on investment to electrify major rail routes is not measured in idealism, efficency or effectiveness, it’s carefully measured in that man made “other” resource-money, utimately perhaps, depending on which side of enviromentalism you prefer, is scarcer these days than the dependability of the natural ones. As the thread on the DM&E aptly demonstrates, as a community and a nation, we have no common vision of the greater public good. As a more practical matter, we simply could not afford to underwrite the project even if it were imperitive that we should. Our European brethren have lines that are largely electrified, and are running trains that make the NEC look like a 19th century Lionel on a tight radius circle of track. Electrification will never occur here…we are smarter than that…
Perhaps technology outpaces our opinions and this situation could change…see link below:
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/873aae7bf86c0110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
it would be a lot cheeper and effecient if they went to 400hz instead of 60 hz. All the controls would be smaller and more effecient.
Once they standarized 400 hz the cost would drop considerably.
it is the same old stoy, “it was done like that when My great grand farther was a kid and that is the way it has to be done.”
That would be my solution, but too many “not in my backyard” wackers out there to let that happen.
Adrianspeeder (proud to have TMI in my backyard)
Turbines in stationary power plants run at constant rpms so they are far more efficient at generating electricity then the variable deisel engines in locomotives.
If our freight railroads would run shorter more frequent trains, service would improve for shippers by offering more frequent or more direct services. Shorter faster more frequent trains would allow electrification to be far more advatagous and beat the deisel in efficientcy. Right now the railroads run on desperation, desperate to improve bottum line with run down, dirty deisels with over length and over weight trains with poor service to save on cost. This makes electric trains look bad, but if the railroad was truely running efficiently you’d probably see money for main lines with catenary.
The PRR had big plans for electrification…in the days of steam. The plan was to electrify all the way west to Pittsburgh. They got only as far as Harrisburg before events overtook their plans. The final blow was the advent of diesels. It turns out it’s cheaper to maintain a couple thousand small diesel power plants than pay for lots of wire and transmission losses.
After the energy crisis of 1973/74, and then in 1980, the RRs took another look. The most ambitious study was one the DOT took as part of the creation of Conrail. Even at the height of diesel fuel cost, the height of nuclear power and with the cheapest possible construction - wood poles for catenary supports - it didn’t have a positive ROI.
Since diesel is currently cheaper than it was in the mid 1970s and early 80s and those locomotive mounted power plants are even more efficient than they were back then, there is absolutely no reason to electrify.
Two other trends will continue to postpone major electrification in the US. (1) Diesels are getting cleaner so the smoke issues have been diffused, and (2) the price of copper and aluminum for transmission lines has skyrocketed.
Best long-term bet (50 years) for replacing diesel from my studies will be hydrogen powered engines (either fuel cell or conventional) with nuclear reactor based hydrogen generation.
dd
Well, electricity is relatively cheaper to diesel fuel than it was 30 years ago, too.
And production efficiency of a modern coal fired plant is greater than it was 30 years ago.
And pollution control equipment for modern coal fired plants is much more advanced than anything that has happened with the basic diesel engine over the past thirty years.
What has changed from 30 years ago is utilization of track capacity, and electrification offers a 15-20% increase in track capacity.
A proper analysis of electrification today, in fact, includes cost advantages in capacity returns and avoided construction costs that were not present thirty years ago.
A proper analysis would include:
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Cost of fuel.
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Equivalent cost of electric power. Currently, the cost of equivalent electric power is about 54% of the cost of diesel at $2.20 per gallon. For the DC systems I am familiar with, about 72% of the substation metered power gets to the rail. This results in an equivalent electric power cost at the rail of about 76% of the cost of diesel fuel.
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Cost differential due to regeneration. For a typical Western railroad profile, 15% of cost at the substation meter can be recovered by regeneration, offering a final equivalent electric power cost at the rail in favor of electrification of just about 65%.
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Cost of financing. Currently, these outweight the fuel savings on a 15 year basis. At 9% financing cost, diesel fuel would have to reach approximately $3.01 per gallon before the savings in diesel fuel costs justified the direct costs of electrification.
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Cost of financing – service life. The cost of financing the diesel-electric fleet over a 30 year period substantially exceeds the c
Another advantage to electrification historically has been the long service life of the motive power and it’s comparitive mechcanical simplicity ie: less moving parts than diesel or steam counterparts. The horsepower potential is as not limited by design. The acceleration rate is potentially greater or as efficent as anti slip devices can provide. They do not require refueling stops.
Is third rail electrification a viable solution if grade crossings are present?