I wish, for the sake of a godo point I could info, but I swore I heard a story in a midwest town here in the US that was hit by a wicked storm. Union Pacific, brougt in a pair of engines and powered the town unitl things could be restored… I gathered it was back in the late 70’s or so.
Some of the newer IGBTs can handle 5,000 + amps each, take hard shorts for microseconds, and be used at working voltages 4, 5 + thousand volts. Yes, they don’t come cheap but nothing that can do this does. Newer inverters tend to be made from IGBTs.
During Katrina, an AMTRAK engine powered the passenger depot in N.O. for almost a month. The struggle was keeping it fueled. CSX powered a yard office briefly with some of its trapped power, but it was not that successful.
I knew I kept all these magazines for a reason. The news article is in Trains April 1998 page 18.CN MLW M420W 3502 was derailed in the Montreal suburb of Boucherville and moved under its own power 400 feet down the middle of a paved street to serve as a portable generator for the town’s civic buildings.
There was a huge ice storm that knocked out the power to 1.35 million customers taking in all of southwest Quebec, plus some adjoining areas of Ontario, New York state and Vermont in January 1998. It took several weeks to get all the power back. Our daughter and her family servived that storm in Ontario.
CN 3508 was going to provide power at a high school turned shelter, but only made it as far as the 3502. Two other locomotives remained on the rails and provided power in the Quebec towns of Richelieu and Coteau.
CP provided SD40 5417 and a container with a generator.
These moves were provided free of charge.
Barry, Regina
Hi All
The city in question was Boucherville, Quebec, a south shore suburb of Montreal, during the ice storm of 1997 I believe it was. Emergency power generation systems within the city failed and the electrical distribution system in the area was seriously damaged. The hospital and senior’s care facilities were without power and so for 3 weeks, as it turned out. The locomotive ( a yard unit if I recall) was run off the end of an industrial spur onto a city street near these critical care locations, Cables at ground level provided power to these facilites and to other public services until the highlines were restored. It was one of a variety of creative substitutes for the standard electrical supply. The weather problem creating this natural disaster was a ground level temperature inversion (fed by an Arctic cold front) which turned a warm high level flow of moisture from south of the Great Lakes, which would otherwise fall as rain, into freezing rain which fell for several days and created ice as much as 6-8" thick. Havoc was the result. These can occur in this area of southern Ontario and Quebec quite easily so don’t be surprised if such an event occurs again. High tension transmission towers were broken like matchsticks for miles and Hydro Quebec imported line crews from as far away as BC and the Central US to clean up the mess. It was one of the most recent natural disasters of such proportions to occur in Canada. The crews worked like Trojans. The response knew no borders.
Charlie
The Sierra Railroad bought a bunch of those locomotives to use for power generation. As far as I know, it never happened. They did have the information on their website. Unfortunately, now it is only about their dinner trains.
My local power company, Northwestern Wisconsin Electric Co., has 18 EMD 20V-645E5 gensets, basically the powerplant of an SD45, scattered around the county for Emergency power. Two are on the east side of town. When the tornado went through a few years ago and destroyed the main power lines, they comartmentalized their network and powered the whole county with the gensets. One pair worked for nearly two weeks straight.
Conrail actually had a set of standing instructions on how to provide quasi-commercial power from a locomotive. For an SD40-2, you attach to the bus before the diodes. Operating in notch 6 runs the generator at 647 RPM. Since the AR10 is a 10 pole machine, that gives 64.7 Hz power. You could tweak the governor to get it closer to 60 Hz if you really wanted to, but for powering everything but clocks, it’s close enough. I think the method for regulating the voltage was to disconnect the load regulator from it’s governor-powered vane motor and dialing the voltage in manually. The output is 3 phase power. Max output in notch 6 is about 1000KW. If the avg home draws 2-3 KW on the avg, that’d power several hundred homes.
It’s VERY simple to use a modern locomotive for standby electric power. During the rolling blackouts in California a FLEET of SD-40s were used to power vast portions of California. An SD-40 can produce about 2 MW. The AR-10 (alternator rectifier) can easily have the rectifier disconnected and the parellell 3 phase connected to the power gris instead . The AR 10 is a 10 pole machine therefore you will produce 60 hz at about throttle 6 .The voltage regulator is simply the locomotives own exitation system . GE locomotves are even simpler , the rectifier is external … easier to unhook
I wonder if many cities today with RR ROWs in them have any kind of contingency plan for this.
That’s the answer I was waiting for.[;)] Thanks Randy !!!
You are correct about how a turbogenerator works as opposed to an aircraft jet engine but many power gas turbine designs have been adapted from aircraft engines. If you look on General Electric’s website there are a number of “aeroderivative” turbines. The most common propulsion turbine used on U.S Navy ships is derived from an engine originally designed for the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 (note that the starting point was a turbofan, not a turboprop). The UP’s turbine electric locomotives also used aeroderivative engines…
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Read the bit at the far right of the page.
To translate from UK to US, bogies are trucks.
carnej1: You are apparently refering to the LM6000. Read again. The only parts that are “aero derived” are in the gas generator portion of the engine. “Aero derived” does not mean that they are interchangeable. The gas generator portion by itself is nothing. The electrical generator is turned by the gas turbine portion. The CF6 and the LM6000 have no parts in common. The UP locomotives were powered by GE frame 5 turbines (also known later as model 5000) and these are described as “Heavy duty industrial gas turbine in the 25-30 megawatt class” on GE"s website.
Prior to Y2K CP modified several SD40-2’s for standby power hook up and had them stationed at various points around the system in case things did not go smoothly after 0001 on 1/1/2000.
These units have a metal cabinet mounted behind the upright air filter behind the cab on fireman side.