Hi everybody. I been seening so many engines in Missouri and I don’t know which engines are the most powerful. What do you guys think is the most powerful horsepowered locomotive ever.
sincerely
Ryan LaPlaca
The AC6000CW has a 6000 Horsepower diesel engine but there reliability is not the best. If you want the more powerful locomotives you really can’t look at how much HP they have. Instead see how there tractive effort is and there pulling power. A locomotive can have 12000 HP and that sounds powerful. But without the tractive effort that locomotive won’t go anywhere.
The SD70ACe has 4300 HP and a continuous tractive effort of 180,000 pounds per square inch at 15 miles per hour. Now that is some true power. Also the ES44AC and DC have quite the pulling power. I don’t know the exact Tractive effort though.
James
You failed to mention the SD90 that has 6000 HP.
Victor
Happy Railroading.[swg][swg]
True…but it can be ordered with a 4400 HP diesel engine. This was featured because not all railroads wanted the high horsepower locomotives for one reason. Yes two of the 6000 HP locomotives could pull a 150 car train. But lets say one of the two 6000 HP locomotives died. Now you only have one. And one could not pull a 150 car train. This was the problem and railroads did not want to go through that. Now if you had three 4400 HP units hauling a 150 car train and one of the locomotive died, two of those units could pull that train. Also the 4400 HP unit saved more gas than the 6000 HP unit. So railroads didn’t like to add three of the 6000 HP units on. Plus that doesn’t make much sence.
James
I agree completely.
Could someone please explain the difference between tractive effort and Horsepower to me?
Alexander
Tractive effort, measured in pounds of drawbar pull (not PSI), is the locomotive’s ability to get a standing train to move. It is directly related to weight on drivers, but has very little to do with horsepower, which is why many roads use slugs (units with traction motors but no engine, fed from an attached unit with a prime mover) for switching. A GP(fill in the blank) with a Bo-Bo slug of the same weight has twice the tractive effort of the GP unit operating alone, but the same horsepower.
Horsepower relates to the ability of a given locomotive (or combination of locomotives) to accelerate to speed and move the train over the road. The higher the horsepower, the faster the train can be run (up to the limit of allowable speed on a given stretch of railroad.)
As for your original question, the most powerful locomotives (outside of the 6000HP diesels already mentioned) are history. The UP 8500HP turbine was the most powerful internal combustion locomotive ever built. In steam, the C&O/VGN 2-6-6-6 Alleghany was designed to develop 8000HP (but may never have achieved that on dynamometer tests.) The Pennsy (and successor) GG-1 electrics, nominally rated at 4500HP continuous, could put 8000HP on the line for starting and short hard bursts of power. The GG-1 has been preserved, the others were not.
Chuck
The C&O Alleghany registered 7000 HP on dynonometer tests as did the PRR Q-2
4-4-6-4. There’s one Alleghany on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. I was beginning to think this thread was going to be exclusively about those new fangled thingies.
So when the train is stopped it needs tractive effort to get moving, then horsepower gets it goung faster?
the chunnel tunnel locomotives are rated at over 9000HP (9387HP to be exact) or 7000Kw.
its a real shame that these loco’s are so often overlooked. even over here it is difficult to find any reference to them in the railway press. its just one of those things that if a machine does its job flawlessly then people become blazee about it.
the chunnel tunnel barly gets mentioned unless its bad news.
Peter
ALexander13.
You got it in one!
One of the reasons that diesels took over from reciprocating steamers was that a diesel develops its full horsepower at start and a steam loco doesn’t develop its maximum horsepower unless it is running at speed. A commonly heard comment of the transition era was that a diesel could start more train than it could pull, while a steam loco could pull more train than it could start.
Chuck
No one has mentioned the 6900 hp 'DDA40X class engines that the UP ordered in 1969.
Jim
Opps - that is 6600 hp for the DDA40X - sorry for the typo!
Jim
If one looks at the most powerful sucessful and popular locomotives they are never the most powerful. Mainly for the reasons stated above but also because many railroads don’t need them.
The SD40-2, GP38-2, Dash-8 Series and new GEvo units aren’t the most powerful locomotives availble. Even the F7, the steamkiller, wasn’t more powerful compaired to the C-Liners from FM.
Fuel prices are also a factor. The SD45 was big power back when it was new. However, because of the energy crisis in the 1970s, it was never that popular. Today they have largely dissapeared from most of America, but there are still hundreds of the less powerful SD40-2s.
Electric engines however don’t suffer from many of the drawbacks of high horsepower that diesels do, as a result they are usually much more powerful and smaller. Amtrak’s new 8,000hp Acela HHP engines can pull just about anything the Northeast Corridor can generate. The NEC has always been a big power playground though, the GG1s could actually overload their motors and almost double their horsepower for short times. The horsepower ratings went up from there: E60-6000hp, AEM7-7,000hp, Acela HHP-8,000hp and the Acela Express bullet trains have two 6,000hp electrics.
Cheers!
~METRO
The chunnel…everytime I hear that, I can’t help but think it sounds like somethin nasty.