We would of course think that if anything freight-transportation-related is to be electrified in the Southern California region, that would be the major rail lines, such as the Alameda Corridor (trench) from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, etc. However -
Up early this past Monday morning (May 14th), I caught this 2 min. 08 sec. video news report on the early morning “First Business” TV show on a Siemens technology to convert more of America’s transportation network to electricity power instead of diesel, titled "ELECTRIC AVENUE - What the trucking industry is doing to become greener - 5/14/12", by Chuck Coppola. It would use trucks powered from dual overhead catenary to minimize air pollution, etc., with that LA - LB location being a ‘pilot project’. It kind of reminds me of a trolley bus on steroids - with Faiveley-type single-arm pantographs instead of trolley poles - see:
I’ll leave it to others to comment on the practicality (or not) of this proposal, weight penalties, ‘drift’ in the electrified lane, passing or swerving to avoid obstacles, ramps, funding, swapping tractors or trucks once outside of that region, etc., etc.
Nevertheless, I will observe that it would be a darned shame - and a missed opportunity, most likely with considerable public funding involved - if the trucks in that area obtained the benefits of being electrified before the railroads do !
From one who spent a healthy chunk of time in Hobart Yard (and the Ports), the draymen couldn’t afford it and most of that truck traffic up the 710 and Slauson and whatever route you wan’t to pick couldn’t stay tethered to the catenary and do most of their business. The traffic just plain scatters to the winds in the LA Basin.
Govenor Moonbeams couldn’t justify the installation to even the most loyal of his followers. They be flat busted broke and about to be national news again.
PDN and MC, you both missed that the trucks are Diesel-Electric hybrids, I wonder if that concept might work? has any other industry tried a D/E hybrid concept? [swg] The trucks operate in D/E mode when needed and take advantage of the catenary when available. At least that is the proposed concept.
I attended the 1990-92 SoCal Regional Rail Authority hearings on electrifying the freight RR’s in the LA basn - when all said and done, the estimated cost came out to 4B$ in 1992 dollars, with have off that amount just for improving clearances (raising overpasses or lowering track). My impression at the time was that there were better ways of spending the money to reduce air pollution or some rather draconan steps to reduce other sources. Battery and power electronics have improved immensely over the last 20 years, so one possibility would be using battery electric hybrids to allow the catenary to be de-energized in areas of low clearance.
Similarly, using battery electric hybrids may be the way to go with trucks. Still think t would be a losing proposition compared to rail.
Haul trucks in deeper open cast mines have used the hybrid system diesel-electric normal drive, with a straight electric kicker for steeper climbs using a side-arm pan with offset cantenary.
Wal-Mart TRIED a Hybrid Semi Truck in 2007 well they returned it 6 months later. Why it weighed 3 TONS more than the Standard Model and could not stay out of the SHOPS. Yes their are some SMALL Hybrid Diesels out there but nothing that could pull a Container Trailer. Why Weight is the Biggest Issue where are you going to shove a 200HP electric Motor and Batteries needed to move it and have it be Light ENOUGH to carry a DECENT Cargo 6K lbs is alot of Dead wieght to Drag Around and not even Carbon Fiber Frame Rails can offset that.
No, I caught that, but didn’t want to take the additional time to expound on that detail.
Actually, I’d call them a ‘dual mode’ = one type of power source or the other exclusively, not both at the same time, which is how I would informally characterize a hybrid (I have a 2005 Toyota Prius, and it runs in all the possible combinations, I think).
[EDITED a little] And yes, that “D/E hybrid concept” is old enough to be respectable - in the railroad industry, even. New Haven’s EMD FL9’s from the late 1950’s ran off 3rd rail in the New York City tunnels, then fired up the diesel prime mover once they were out in the open - see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_FL9 I believe some of Amtrak’s P32’s have that capability, and there’s a gosh-awful-expensive series of dual-mode locomotives now being built for NJ Transit - like $8 Million each for a very small number/ limited-production run - by Bombardier which has been the subject of some other threads here from time to time - see under “United States” at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro-diesel_locomotive , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Genesis#P32AC-DM , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_DM30AC , and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALP-45DP
With all due respect, those hearings were 10 years pre-Alameda Corridor - how much of the clearance improvement cost did that project take care of ? How much have been taken care of otherwise since then by other projects ?
Also, since then Amtrak extended its electrification 155 miles from New Haven to Boston, and a few hundred (thousand ?) miles of catenary have been erected and energized for various light rail and streetcar projects. Not directly comparable, I know, but it’s gone from being a ‘lost art’ to a skill that’s back in the day-to-day toolbox of the big electrical contracting firms.
I also persist in thinking that the catenary poles would make dandy transmission and distribution routes for utilities in the region that need them and might be handicapped by or facing local "NIMBY’ type objections, which ought to be worth something towards defraying the installation cost.
Best of all, capital money is available in the requisite large quantities at rates of from 3 to 6 % for terms of 10 to 30 years, depending on who’s borrowing and in what way, etc. That’s really the biggest single cost item for electrification, and now it’s available at a huge discount ! ($4 Billion at 6%
The Amtrak locomotives you are referring to are actually dual mode units built using a Genesis carbody but with the 12 cylinder 12-710 engine used in the DASH 8-32B. They are called P32AC-DMs and are the only Diesel locomotives Amtrak owns currently which have AC traction motors. They have third rail pickup shoes so they
(1) Have yet to see a storage battery in heavy use that has a decent lifespan. Those things are hardly cheap and have additional issues once they are no longer reliable.
(2) As those batteries become less usefull, the vehicles beome less usefull because they can’t stray too far from the catenary for fear of being stranded.
Not good.
And even with electrifying the railroads in the LA Basin, anyone building an overpass over the railroad I worked for howled at the new 26’6" ATR clearance standard. The cost of the additional grade runoffs and impact on adjoining properties was claimed to be too much for new bridges and approaches. (We won’t even get into the additional span (s) required to accomodate Amthrax and MetroJoke that all new were coming in the short term)
The key to long and prosperous battery life is “charge management” - both rates of discharge and recharge, and level of charge. In brief, for lead-acid batteries, keep the charge level between something like 40% and 80% of total charge, and don’t draw or replenish too fast, and they’ll last a long time. Go beyond those limits, and the battery life shortens drastically. Our 2005 Prius still has its original battery at 93,000 miles - it’s warranted to 150K. More to the point, I know of 3 others of the same vintage that are well past 250K - one is now about 310 K - that are all still on their original batteries. Their owners are ‘hyper-milers’ who usually achieve 70 MPG and better, so they’re using the batteries often and hard, not babying them at all - they depend on the software of the battery management system to keep them out of trouble.
Wouldn’t need all that much battery capacity, though, to power through 100 ft. of ‘dead’ catenary at an overpass with close clearances, or similar.
For instance, let’s take a 4,400 HP ( = 3,300 KW) locomotive at full output at about 10 MPH ( = 15 ft. per second), so it could through in about 6.7 seconds - but let’s say 30 seconds instead = 0.5 minute to allow for a 3-multiple-unit consist (300 ft.) to get by and the transitions from catenary to battery and back again. 3,300 KW for 0.5 minute = 27.5 KWHr.
[:-,] But did the highway dept. “bubbas” - that’s who it had to be, ‘cause who else would build an overpass over a railroad ? - ever back off at all on the minimum clearance for overpasses over their roads and highways (usually 14’-6" +/-) ? No ? Well, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander . . . . [:-^] [swg]
Preaching to the choir, Paul. In the LA Basin, Caltrans is only a player if State Money is involved. Each town and the county is it’s own fiefdom. (about as bad as new Jersey, in some respects worse)…
If only some of those bridges were 14’-6"[sigh] …Worked a bridge strike at Hobart where Eastern Avenue and Atlantic go under (where the soap plant was)…Clearance was about 12’10" and well marked. Trucks hammered it regularly in spite of the advance signage. The 4 track wide thru-plate girder cleaned a sea container strapped to conventional flatbed trailer clear off the trailer…and landed on a Honda following behind.[+o(]
Where is the electricity going to come from? Doesn’t California have a strict moratorium on new power plant construction of any type? All you’ll be doing is moving the pollution problem from one location to another – from the LA basin to wherever the power plant is located.
The planned Alameda Corridor was mentioned several times during the hearings. If the electrification proposal ahd actually gone somewhere, the Alameda Corridor would naturally have been built to provide clearance for the wires.
FWIW, the assumptions were electrifying at 50kV, double stack with two 9’6" containers, 6" of ballast growth and two feet from the top of the car to the contact wire and two feet from highest live wire to structures above.
That looks like a reasonable analysis for energy storage requirements. Your proposed battery solution works out to an equivalent of 2 w-hrs/kg, which is lower than what an ultracapacitor can achieve (4+ w-hrs/kg) and the ultracaps are good for 100,000 to 500,000 charge/discharge cycles. Another option would be the nickel halide batteries developed by GE for hybrid locomotive use. Those appear to have a specific energy of 100w-hrs/kg and specific power of 150w/kg. 30 tons of those batteries would allow a worst case of 30 minutes at full power and presumably a lot of cycles at less than 1% depth of discharge.
What makes this a lot more practical than 20 years ago is that the IGBT based inverters will run very nicely off of a constant voltage DC bus.
Everyone that proposes ‘electrification’ of something that has been powered by other means for a generation or more seems to think that the existing power grid can handle the additional load without any increased capacity - the current electrical system is sized for the current level of demand. It becomes overloaded by the stress of AC’s on a hot day - there is no EXCESS capacity for the wild ideas of electrification that get put on the table; if those wild ideas are economically feasible from the users point of view, then additional electrical capacity must be built into the power grid to support those ideas. Nothing is free.
Wire gaps of that size are not all that unusual. On the New Haven line there were (are?) several draw bridges that had wire gaps. The trains simply coasted across. Of course that was a water level route, and I know the LA slot corridor coming away from sea level must have some gradient. However, most trains probably have at least 2 engines, so pans at the front of the first loco and the back of the second could probably bridge the gap. A bus connection between the 2 pans would smooth things out. But I still like the ideas for capacitor or battery backup for the inevitable stop in a gap or power outage.
As giddy as I get over talk of electrics, I have not heard any comments on how this would mesh with current operations. Is the corridor a connector between the docks and a sorting center at the other end, or are the trains built in the port area and this is just the first leg of a cross country trip. If it’s the latter, than I can see why the earlier electrification talks went nowhere. LA could specify that they should use EPA high tier diesels.
Points well taken. A lot of the big electric motors and some commuter cars had a spring-loaded bus bar on the roof at each end, so making and breaking the connection took zero effort and zero hazard to the employees.
But even without that, for just 1 loco to move across the 100 ft. gap would be in the 7 to 10 second range, so the battery power requirements would be even less. As you note, they could coast across, but if under load that might cause an undersirable slack run-in and run-out, so it might have to be avoided or carefully controlled.
I also got to thinking that an electric motor have neither a prime mover diesel engine, nor a big fuel tank, so the temporary battery (or capacitors, or whatever) power could be carried onboard each unit from both a weight and space limits perspective - no need to have the separate ‘slug’ unit to carry the batteries as I mentioned before.
The problem then, of course, is the classic one of having to change motive power when leaving or entering the LA-LB Port District/ metro area. But I think a better way is to simply attach the electrics ahead of the road diesels (and behind any trailing DPU diesels) for just that short distance - the same as with any ot
