8/30/2006 Mechanical
National Railway Equipment’s ‘Gen-Set’ switcher matches more powerful locomotive’s performance in parallel pull test at L.A. port
During a recent parallel pull test at the Port of Los Angeles, National Railway Equipment Co.’s (NREC) 1,400-horsepower N-ViroMotive™ Gen-Set locomotive matched the performance of a six-axle SD18 switch engine, NREC said. The environmentally friendly “Generator-Set” N-ViroMotive locomotive has 400 less horsepower, and two fewer axles and traction motors than the SD18.
The test called for a new N-ViroMotive 2GS-14B Gen-Set switcher and conventional six-axle SD18 locomotive to pull a 126-unit double-stack container train weighing 6,215 tons. The train moved 1.8 miles from the Terminal Island dock through a series of eight-degree curves and switches, up a final ascending grade measuring more than 1 percent, and over a bridge before reaching a Long Beach, Calif., switch.
The test marked the first time a four-axle Gen-Set switcher has been measured against the pulling power of a higher horsepower, six-axle locomotive, NREC said. Pacific Harbor Line Inc. officials, who observed the test, believed the Gen-Set held the rail well and did not encounter wheel slip, according to the locomotive builder.
Well, Well. For us “old-timers” it looks like a new and improved Baldwin. (Where two units were necessary for any other builder, usually, one Baldwin would do the job.)
I think the Gen-Sets are okay, and have seen the Green Goat things in use. But they aren,t really locomotives to me and hopefully won’t take over out on the main lines any time soon. If something like that ever happened it could be the one thing that would cause me to lose interest in my hobby.
Nothing is mentioned about the relative weight of these two locomotives. If the gen-set engine weighed more than the SD18 (this would be due to the weight of the lead-acid storage batteries), the Gen-Set engine could still meet or exceed the tractive effort of the SD18, at least until the battery charge ran down. Traversing only 1.8 miles, even up the ascending g
There aren’t any large storage batteries in a gen-set locomotive. All energy into the traction motors is coming from the main alternators so draining the battery isn’t an issue.
Gen-sets use truck-size diesel/alternator sets in multiples of two or three. The appropriate number of diesels is fired up and on line at any time for the necessary power output. If the locomotive is running light or moving a small cut of cars or light train, only one engine may be on line. If the cut is heavier, then two or three engines may be running.
NRE is currently marketing gen-set locomotives and Railpower Technologies is marketing both diesel-battery hybrid (the Green Goat) and gen-set locomotives.
So, what else is new? Maschinenbau Kiel AG (MaK), currently named Vossloh locomotives, from Kiel in Germany build 4 locomotives of type DE1003 in 1988 with ac traction. Apparently they didn’t catch on here in Europe.
I think you’d hope that 40 years of development in wheel-slip control would have improved things, so it’s not too surprising that the gen-set loco could match a 40+ year old 6-axle design in some circumstances.
I wouldn’t lose hope just yet - in the UK a new diesel MU train has just started running, fitted with the same Cummins QSK-19 engines as the NREC genset locos, and a 3-car train (750hp per car) makes more noise than a 3300hp class 66 loco fitted with an EMD 710G-12 engine…
I love the fact that a actual railroad will hook a Morgan horse to the log and actually see if it can pull the weight against the Shire to settle the situation.
Some companies probably WOULD pull out the spread sheet and paper over the problem without actually trying to pull such a train or hold real life tests using equiptment that is earning thier keep anyhow.
What matters is the amount of force at the wheel on the rail itself. You can have a team of hamsters, batteries or desiel power on that wheel but when the day is over, that train needs to go from A to B.
How many of your got burned in the dot.com stock scams in the late 1990’s? Sure, all those companies looked good on paper. They would even pull out fancy spreadsheets and Power Point presentations and show you a simulation on how they were going to corner their market. Small problem was that most of them never made a penny of profit operating under real world conditions. Gee whiz, I wonder why none of them are around today?
Or how about this: God forbid one of you comes down with a serious illness. You go to you MD, and he gives you two options: 1) You can try a new therapy based on the work of some egg head Ph.D. who has reams of paper showing that this will solve your problem based on computer models and labatory rat experiments, or 2) you can try a therapy that has been clinically proven in thousands of hospitals on thousands of patients. Which one are you going to go with?
Some of you can say what you want about me and my posts. I am just sick and tired of certain “experts” posting on this site claiming they know locomotive X is better than locomotive Y, only because they like who built X or that X looks better on paper then Y. Never mind they fact that they have never seen X and Y in actual operation.
In the Real World, you don’t even want to think about doing a clinical trial of some therapy until after some egg-head shows with animal experiments (and recently computer models) that the therapy has chance of being reasonably safe and effective. There are four fellows in England that are in pretty bad shape because the recent clinical trial went horribly wrong.
In the case of gen-set locomotives, I’d be willing to bet that the spreadsheets said that they would be a win - what the testing does is to bring up any issues that don’t show up on spreadsheets, such as maintenance, reliability and whether or not the operating characteristics annoy the heck out of the engineer.
I know that locomotive X is better than locomotive Y. I don’t care who builds them , I don’t care what they look like . I have seen them all in operation and I have operated almost all of them. I am not guilty of contempt prior to investigation.
Not all of the class ones are doing everything wrong , just nearly everything wrong . If the class ones listened to me it would be heaven on earth ( unless your a stock holder)
I have job offers from several class ones and I might take my spreadsheets full of proven and theoretical data . And I’ve done well in this industry thus far . More importantly , I enjoy what I do .
I’m not surprised the Gen-set switcher beat the SD18, as the de-turboed SD24 had a minimal wheel slip system. The real question will be, first “Duty Cycle” how much of the time are the second and third engines running,(less is better), and maintenance. The Soo Line was fairly happy with their Cat powered road-switchers until the first overhaul came due at about the four year point. Very quickly they all left. The four years wasn’t a surprise, but I bet the cost was more than they were expecting. There are a lot of pistons, injectors, injection pumps, etc. on those Gen-sets. We’ll will probably have an inkling when the get a few years old.
reliability is the most important question - but when the gen-sets have been around as long as the SD18 we will have the answer to that question as well.
Very true, but at least the Cummins QSK19 has ‘rail heritage’ - we’ve got over 500 of them in the UK underneath various diesel MU passenger trains. As far as I’m aware they’ve been reliable in an application with high thermal stress levels due to the frequent full-throttle/idle cycling the schedules dictate - something that the gen-set application will also create. The oldest engines have been overhauled recently for the first time after 4-5 years of intensive use - unfortunately Cummins fouled up some of the rebuilds, resulting in early failures of the overhauled engines due to oil starvation (much embarrasment…)
I think this whole argument loses one important point. A lot depends on what the locomotive is used for. I doubt a genset locomotive would perform as well as the best of the current road diesels in over-the-road intermodal or heavy lugging for long periods on mountain grades. But in fact, that is the service for what ALL conventional diesel locomotives have been designed for until recently. Because that is the market for which technological progress has been made, and commuter locomotives, switchers, transfer jobs, all are just versions of the over-the-road heavy freight hauler. So the genset locomotive is trying a different approach for switcher applications. I hope it and the goat are successes for the sake of the industry.