[:)] How come that General Electric Transportation systems and Electromotive Division have not designed and putting locomotives in America’s Railroad market for high speed trains ?
I wish now that they built to compete with their nearest competitor like Bombardier Transportation,Alstom,and Talgo like locomotive manufacturers in the North America’s territory due to the Obama’s Administration for the stimulus.
Raily Yours
That would a lot of engineering expense for a pretty thin market, assuming that the market will even exist. Both EMD and GE would probably be smarter to execute licensing agreements with overseas manufacturers.
EMD supplies the diesel engines, electrical systems, and other components for the majority of North American passenger locomotives built in the last few years by Bombardier, Alstom, and Motive Power Industries and they seem to be satisfied with the arrangement.
General Electric has a new passenger locomotive design in their catalog. They have not built a prototype yet but they are actively trying to market the unit to Amtrak.
Both the existing EMD and GE passenger designs do not meet the current FRA buff/collision standards. GE has a proposal for a follow-on to the Genesis locomotives. EMD currently supplies the ‘innards’ for the MPI MP36 series locomtives that do meet the current standards. Any new design will also have to meet Tier II emission standards.
The actual design of any new high speed train still needs to be done(who knows if this will be articulated or seperate power cars). Also the total sale may be rather small compared to what EMD/GE can crank with freight locomotives.
Jim
I hope I’m not missing something, but surely a high speed line will be electrified. There are 125mph diesels, but only one is in regular service at that speed - the HS125 in Britain. 125mph is in reality only medium speed - high speed is 150 to 200mph top speed.
There are three basic high speed technologies. French TGV, German ICE and Japanese Skinkansen. All are electricly powered complete trainsets. The French still prefer cars coupled between two high speed power cars - the Germans and Japanese are heading towards distributed power, ie powered axles throughout the train. In all cases the trainsets are to all intents and purposes inseperable except in the maintenance depot, indeed the French ones have articulated trucks making separation really quite tricky.
Getting back to the question GE and EMD are very good at designing heavy, powerful, high tractive effort, 6 axle diesels. They have virtually no experience at designing relatively light, high horsepower (7,000+), low tractive effort, 4 axle electrics; let alone high speed multiple units. They weren’t much good at it in the 1970s (E60s), and things have moved on a long way since then. Look where the Eastern commuter roads buy their electric engines - Bombardier in Kassel in Germany.
As was noted above, neither EMD or GE have locos that are currently up to standards. Designing one would be VERY expensive.
NJT’s PL42ACs were built by Alstom, although they are powered by and EMD 710. These locos cost somewhere around $4.4 million EACH. Not exactly cheap…
Exactly NJT’s original ALP-46s (from 2001) were from Bombardier and built in Germany. The 46As, which are currently beginning to arrive (one is here for testing, and one is out at Pueblo for testing), are also being built in Kassel.
And guess where the NJT and AMT ALP-45DPs (dual mode) are going to be built? Yes, that’s right. Germany.
And also, these are expensive. While I don’t know about the first 27 46As, I know that the add on order of 9 cost $8M PER LOCO…
And guess how much the DPs are going to cost. $12 MILLION.
Because demand for passenger locos is not nearly as high as demand for freight locos, they come at a much higher cost. Amtrak better start saving their pennies if they want new locos…
To the extent that any HSR line is built from scratch on a new track alignment, it most likely will be electric. To the extent that someone desires to institute HSR on an existing, non-electrified route it will most likely be done with diesel electric technology as a matter of expedience and economy. HSR implementation in the US will not be done with a blank check mentality and to retro-fit a existing line for electrification will require a blank check.
The NEC is the only trackage in the US that is basically dedicated to passenger operation and it is owned and operated by Amtrak and it is electrified from Boston to Washington, DC (and most of this electrification was done in the 30’s by prior ownership). All other existing passenger routes in the US are owned and operated by freight railroads and are not electrified. While many self styled ‘visionaries’ have floated numerous plans for electrifying segments of the freight lines…the ownership of those lines have not seen enough economic return in those plans to commit the capital to them and implement them.
GE and EMD Passenger locomotives are essentially freight locomotives re-geared with the addition of auxiliary power. Their high unsprung weight results in damaging Vertical Track (P2) Forces making operation above 79 mph undesirable. P2 Force, as opposed to rail stress, penetrates deep into the substrate making it difficult to impossible to maintain alignment. The British developed this concept that is now broadly accepted through out the industry. Amtrak was one of the last to buy into it (probably because most of their people have a freight background) but aceded to it in the Acela design that has truck mounted motors. The TGV has body mounted motors and the French RTG’s have hydraulic transmission drive with secondary axel suspension for minimum P2 Force generation. I co-authored a paper on this subject a number of years ago.
Jerry,
I presume the problem is unsprung weight due to the nose mounting typical of US design. I would expect quill drive locomotives would have been easier on the track.
As a note, funding for the PRR’s line from Wilmington south to DC was through a federal loan(PWA?) in 1933, which was repaid with interest!
No matter which builder is finally choosen there must be a heavy penalty for unreliability. I know that is going to be a drag for GE but locomotive failure is not an option for passenger operations.
Eric
You are right. Quill drive gets the motor weight off the axle. The British tried a further step by isolating the wheel rim with an elastomer leaving only the rim as unsprung. Good idea in principle but not too good in practice. San Francisco’s Bart cars use isolated rims (at least they did when I was involved) for noise suppression. This precludes tread braking but they use disc so it seems to work OK. As an aside, dynamometer tests before the cars were built indicated the discs could not meet the braking requirements from the design speed of 80 mph in the event that dynamic brake failed. In early operatrions this was proven to be true (failed discs came up through the floor!) and speed was lowered, to 70 mph I believe.
Jerry,
I remember hearing a lot of about the problems was having with the brakes during the early years (I attended Cal from '72 to '78). It might be more accurate to describe BART’s electrical braking system as regenerative/dynamic - the braking resistors were switched in between 1100 and 1200V in case there was no load to make use of the regenerated power (someone from BART gave a talk for one of the electric power systems seminars ca. 75 or 76).
My recollection was that the drop in the max speed from 80 to 70 was also to reduce problems with the commutators.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure Amtrak doesn’t want a bunch of new locomotives exploding…
[:-^]
Just to add, remember the Electrically Powered 6 car Amtrak “Acela” train set requires two locomotives (one at each end) totaling 12,000 HP just to get it up to the 150 MPH carded speed.
The unsprung weight of typical North American diesel-electrics is bad, but so is the total axle load of about 36 tons. Don’t the P42 Genesis locomotives weigh 292,000 lbs? This is almost twice as much as for a high-speed power car or double-deck coach.
Lateral forces also are exacerbated by higher axle loads; and most lateral motion and mass of the truck is absorbed in the secondary suspension. The X2000 elastomeric suspension and snubbers absorbed the lateral motion in the primary as well as the secondary suspension.
Another reason for distributed powered cars for the ICE and newer Shinkansen is for better adhesion with respect to the size of the train and traction power while maintaining acceptable axle loads.
It wasn’t just getting up to 150 mph; but doing so in less than 10 miles between restrictions. The short train helps; but I wonder what would happen if Acela ran with 8-10 cars?
The Acela trainsets are designed to reach 165 MPH (and the systems they use are designed for 200 MPH) so I’m not sure this is accurate.
Additionally, Amtrak is awaiting completion of an order of twenty coaches to increase the size of each train by one coach (this happened before stimulus).
Does A-1-A truck arrangement come into play here and didn’t someone take an F40 style unit and outfit it with a lighter weight high hp turbine? Seems like I remember seeing an article years back boasting about incredible acceration of the unit and also some data about the weight on the drivers. Wish I could find the article, it may have value for this discussion.
True, 165 MPH was the Spec. and it did exceed it. The “Time Table” (carded) speed of 150 MPH is reached in only 2 sections of The Corridor, Boston’s Route 128 Station to “Boston Switch” in Pawtucket and in souther Rhode Island. The rest of the line has great track rebuilding but speed restrictions do to “Grade Crossings” in southeast Connecticut, 100 year old " Draw Bridges" , and 85 year old “Overhead Wires” (Catenary). The trains are also slowed in some sections north of New Haven do to curves in the 160 year old “Right-of-Way” combined with the design error limiting the “Tilt” to half of what was planned. Rates of Acceleration are set to Passenger Comfort, riding in a passener car you do not “feel” the speed, up front you know your moving.
