In Indianapolis, CSX is running a radio spot that states CSX hauls Freight Cars with vehicles inside them. Some are 30 mpg vehicles, and that if it is a hybrid then 50 mpg, but that the Locomotive hauling these Freight Cars gets 423 mpg. Then the catch phrase at the end is; “Wouldn’t it be great if we all could drive trains?” But, isn’t that a bit of a stretch since most locomotive magazines that I have read indicate the performance at best is 3 mpg- using 10,000 gallon tanks? Anyone out there have a take on this? [:)]
Well, yes, that’s obviously untrue-- so what did they actually say? That each automobile was being transported 423 miles for each gallon the engine burned?
Lessee… so let’s say the train is carrying 1000 automobiles … rolling at 50 mph on the level … if they’re right they’d be burning 118 gallons per hour … which is impossible. So they must have meant something else.
423 ton miles per gallon sounds right, though. So, for a typical Multilevel, 15 cars at 3500# plus 30 tons light weight = 56 tons. That’s 7.6 mpg per multilevel car x 15 vehicles = 113 vehicle mpg
of course,if you leave out the “tons” part it sounds much worse…each locomotive uses 2-5 gallons per mile…
I want to see the engine with 10000 gallon tanks
[D)] what about the hybrid engines?
Well, since there exists exactly ONE line haul hybrid freight locomotive…
My father was a colleague of Deodat Clejan at GATX, the originator of the RRollway auto ferry intermodal concept. The idea was to have an ultra wide gauge track and to have a 20-foot wide train which was side-loaded by passengers driving their cars past garage doors that opened up on the sides of the trains at station stops. There is nothing on Google about RRollway, but Google Patents turned up
http://www.google.com/patents?id=3IdfAAAAEBAJ&dq=Deodat+Clejan
which is pretty much the way I remember it as a child.
That concept never went anyplace, but my father is named on patents to do the same thing with standard-gauge railroads. Clejan lost his life in a general-aviation accident and my dad and others carried on the work. One patent was for side loading of a wide-body train that used standard gauge tracks, another was for a more conventional multi-level auto carrier but with a turntable of the auto carrier box in the style of Flexi-Van to allow end loading of individual auto carrier boxes.
People were serious about this – among my dad’s notes rescued from the red squirrels that have taken over the garage are statistics on the lengths of passenger automobiles in the 1960s for the purpose of figuring out how wide the RRollway needed to be.
The closest of the RRollway concept of passengers riding in their own cars was the never-built third element of the Claiborne Pell Northeast Corridor Demonstration project, which would have been a full double-deck car of the height of the Colorado Railcars double-decker for taking New Yorkers down to Florida. The AutoTrain Corporation implemented that Florida car ferry that Amtrak now operates,