One of the reported advantages of PSR is that a railroad can move more tonnage in longer trains and with fewer locomotives.
How?
On a hypothetical piece of track, if it takes 3,000hp to move 3,000 tons, to my tiny mind that equates to 1hp/ton. Allowing for the wheel/rail interaction (friction), it would seem to me that it would not matter if those 3,000 tons were hauled by a single 3,000hp loco, or if 4 sets of 3,000 tons each were strung together (12,000 tons) and were hauled by four 3,000hp locomotives.
Of course there are apparent crew savings (I say apparent because I doubt that the time required to assemble a monster train, to run a monster, and to do any work with a monster are not figured in, all in order to make PSR look better), but I just do not understand where a railroad can store so many units after implementing PSR, unless the railroad was previously running way-overpowered trains.
X tons would seem to require Y horsepower, regardless of the train configuration.
The locomotive fleet reductions are achieved by pushing them harder, turning them faster, and getting rid of as many yard engines as possible in favour of using road units that are laying over between trains.
Pushing units harder means running every train to maximum tonnage, which you achieve by combining as much available traffic as possible into one train (mix intermodal and carload, or add stuff onto a unit train) and “convincing” customers to ship the same number of cars 7 days a week. Anything that doesn’t fit into the predetermined operating plan gets driven away, usually on a truck…
Turning locomotives faster means not taking them into the shop for preventative maintenance or to fix small, and sometimes major problems. “We don’t need working dynamics or all 6 motors cut in, get that thing out on a train!”.
Any spare capacity is eliminated in the world of PSR, and this includes locomotives. Any protect engines or older units that may have been temporarily stored (in case of a increase in traffic) are eliminated.
In my territory when I retired trains were operating at 0.4 tons per HP - I don’t know where PSR could squeeze the power on the trains tighter. Speed on the grades involved were on the order of 10-12 MPH, on level ground about 32 MPH.
Sounds about right for your old employer, they had a reputation for running underpowered trains in districts where grades were favorable.
Theoretically, a pair of MP15’s could move the same train as a pair of GP50’s, just appreciably slower due to the lesser horsepower.
There are two pieces to this. One is locomotive utilization - which PSR tries to improve by enforcing balanced trains/lanes.
But, the bigger trains thing? The words sound like “we’re gonna power to drag rating” which means longer running times between terminals. Another implication of longer trains is more time spent getting through speed-resticted areas such as curves, diverging moves into and out of sidings and more time launching and putting away DPU trains.
About the only part of PSR that will improve trains speed is if you can arrange schedules to minimize passing moves, and minimize meets on the most capacity constrained areas. Not a trivial exercise.
CSX has about 1200 fewer locomotives now. Yet “CSX’s key operational metrics all showed improvement in the quarter. Average train speed was up 17%, terminal dwell declined 14% — both setting records — and the number of cars online dropped despite flat volume. On-time train originations held steady at 81%, but on-time arrivals inched up to 64% from 57% a year ago.”
The claim: PSR allows running longer trains with fewer locomotives.
I do not believe this means that PSR enables railroads to turn hotshots into drag freights.
It does not refer to increasing the weight of a given train and then powering it with fewer locomotives.
Instead, it means a company can run its trains while owning fewer locomotives. It has nothing to do with the number of locomotives on a given train. In fact, each longer train will require more locomotives.
It is just that PSR will make this possible by providing better locomotive utilization due to train scheduling, blocking, etc.
Better locomotive utilization will render some locomotives surplus. Some of the surplus locomotives can be sold and some can be used to run longer trains.
Turning ‘Hotshots’ into drags is exactly what CSX has done on the I-95 corridor. Q031 & Q032 have been combined with the Tropicana Juice train - the train is now of sufficient tonnage and length to require DPU operation - using the same total power complement that the UPS Intermodal trains Q031 & Q032 used as strictly UPS Intermodal trains.
Our version of PSR sure seems like a return to the “drag freight” era. Not that it wasn’t happening before, just now it’s affecting more trains. More trains doing more intermediate work. This causes long trains that don’t fit anywhere without blocking something that end up stopping because the yards can’t take them. Either because other trains are working or waiting to work or the yard has to switch cars to make room for more cars. (One night the midnight yard engine didn’t switch a single car because when one train was done working, another was coming in to work.)
I’m confused about all this talk about scheduled trains. I read that we no longer care about train performance. It’s all about individual car permor
Turning ‘Hotshots’ into drags is exactly what CSX has done on the I-95 corridor. Q031 & Q032 have been combined with the Tropicana Juice train - the train is now of sufficient tonnage and length to require DPU operation - using the same total power complement that the UPS Intermodal trains Q031 & Q032 used as strictly UPS Intermodal trains.
Our version of PSR sure seems like a return to the “drag freight” era. Not that it wasn’t happening before, just now it’s affecting more trains. More trains doing more intermediate work. This causes long trains that don’t fit anywhere without blocking something that end up stopping because the yards can’t take them. Either because other trains are working or waiting to work or the yard has to switch cars to make room for more cars. (One night the midnight yard engine didn’t switch a single car because when one train was done working, another was coming in to work.)
This is an interesting thread. It has covered the headline issues horsepower ratio under PSR, number of fleet locomotives and several operational issues while running or at yards.
But what about fuel consumption? Do any of you have thoughts on what effect the move to longer, heavier (and slower) trains has on that?
There have been a number of posts here, some from very good ‘authorities’, that have discussed the pros and cons of longer trains for fuel economy, both in the ‘instant’ and bottom-line respects. Alas! until we get a functional search capability you’ll have to Google various combinations of terms and hope Kalmbach content-security failures are widespread enough that Google bots caught and indexed relevant posts…
I think it is ‘necessary and desirable’ to consider the various factors involved in running longer trains in the real world. We have a couple of posters here who were involved in some of the plans to do ‘the opposite’ over the years: run more frequent lighter trains for various presumably bottom-line advantage. My introduction to this was the Trains Magazine article that discussed Perlman’s thinking on the subject when he went to WP… some of those arguments could be adapted and used today, particularly in connection with advancing autonomous technology.
I have in particular noted that a couple of knowledgable railroaders have discussed where ‘slower’ most certainly did not translate into ‘less fuel’ here. There’s also been discussion about the ways in which a ‘slower’ railroad may suffer more and longer siding dwell or other issues, which further exacerbate problems when longer consists exceed practical siding lengths.
We might bring up the issue of shutting down and restarting nominally-DPU power in some of these monster distributed trains during longer and longer enforced stoppages, or as anticipated power requirements or train-handling concerns involve minute-to-minute the specific number of running or ‘enabled’ locomotives in various positions.
TheBogieMan
But what about fuel consumption? Do any of you have thoughts on what effect the move to longer, heavier (and slower) trains has on that?
There have been a number of posts here, some from very good ‘authorities’, that have discussed the pros and cons of longer trains for fuel economy, both in the ‘instant’ and bottom-line respects. Alas! until we get a functional search capability you’ll have to Google various combinations of terms and hope Kalmbach content-security failures are widespread enough that Google bots caught and indexed relevant posts…
I think it is ‘necessary and desirable’ to consider the various factors involved in running longer trains in the real world. We have a couple of posters here who were involved in some of the plans to do ‘the opposite’ over the years: run more frequent lighter trains for various presumably bottom-line advantage. My introduction to this was the Trains Magazine article that discussed Perlman’s thinking on the subject when he went to WP… some of those arguments could be adapted and used today, particularly in connection with advancing autonomous technology.
I have in particular noted that a couple of knowledgable railroaders have discussed where ‘slower’ most certainly did not translate into ‘less fuel’ here. There’s also been discussion about the ways in which a ‘slower’ railroad may suffer more and longer siding dwell or other issues, which further exacerbate problems when longer consists exceed practical siding lengths.
We might bring up the issue of shutting down and restarting nominally-DPU power in some of these monster distributed trains during longer and longer enforced stoppages, or as anticipated power requirements or train-handling concer
The CSX claim of nearly 500 ton miles/gallon was based upon the tonnage the system handled over a period of time versus the gallons of fuel pumped into locomotives over that same period of time. How accurate that figure is for any particular movement is fully open to question.
Needless to say the CSX system has all the physical characteristics that challenge fuel efficiency - grades, flat lands, heat, cold you name it CSX has it somewhere on their system.