Sorry but this is the most convenient forum for me to ask this on… I know a lot of you are on other sites/forums etc. Anyone have knowledge of any orders being placed for the Tier 4 ACe’s? I know UP had some ordered but I haven’t found anything that shows interest by BNSF, KCS, CN etc.
I thought I read that CP had some testers on their rails? Any one think they’d actually buy EMD?
Thanks
Have you read page 18 of the current (April) Trains?
That shows 346 domestic units of all kinds currently on order from all builders.
I assume that some of these are part of the 88 new SD70ACeT4 units being built for UP (UP are taking 12 SD70ACeT4 demonstrators).
But GE must only have orders for around 200 ET44s for 2017 on that basis.
It isn’t that nobody is buying SD70ACeT4s, nobody is buying locomotives…
Peter
Here is a complete layman’s question.
I know the Tier 4 units lower emissions significantly from Tier 3. Does Tier 4 do anything for fuel efficiency compared to Tier 3?
Thank you in advance for sharing your knowledge.
I have no hard numbers, but rumors are that fuel economy is worse for Tier IV locomtives than for Tier III, and quite a bit (5%) worse. I don’t know if that figure is in any way accurate, but EGR has traditionally been associated with loss of fuel economy in other applications.
I would suspect that the issue is more with the DPF (the particulate filter). Periodically this builds up soot and has to be ‘cleaned out’ perhaps comparatively often at unpredictable intervals. The way this has often been done is via ‘regeneration’, which is a fancy way of saying that additional fuel is used to take the EGT waaaaaay up to where the carbon in the soot heats up and ‘burns off’ – perhaps needless to say, this is done by using more fuel each time. Light truck diesels in particular show about this magnitude (5-6%) reflected in indicated mileage (rather than sfc numbers) which may indicate some additional losses while the process is going on. (There is also the problem of flame out of the tailpipe and ignition of leaves under the vehicle, etc. that crops up from time to time; not sure whether this would increase hood-door scorch on GEs…)
MEANWHILE, one of the major points of Tier 4 final is a drastic reduction in NOx levels. This requires lower peak temperature in the combustion reaction, and perhaps lower peak compression ratio in the engine. Both those things take down the efficiency of a conventional compression-ignition engine burning relatively heavy liquid fuels, and they also restrict to an extent the amount of EGR enthalpy that can be used to ‘regenerate’ (not the same sense as above; it’s in the sense that gas turbines use exhaust heat to increase the temperature of intake air) the intake charge. NOT a ‘win-win’ for fuel economy in any sense. But for those concerned about the added number of grams/hp/hr of NOx for Tier 4 over Tier 3, it must be worthwhile (even though the grams of carbon a
BNSF has been testing a pair of SD70ACe-T4-P4 units. Source in the link below.
http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2016/09/08-emd-p4-tier-4-demos-set-to-begin-testing
Here is a good summary of the standards:
https://www.dieselnet.com/standards/us/loco.php
Scroll down to Table 3.
Note the dramatic reduction in particulate matter emission from Tier 3 to Tier 4 which leads to RME’s earlier comments.
The standard makes no reference to fuel consumption.
Peter
I do believe EMD/Cat are going after the ‘valued added’ features vs GE. For example, they focused quite a bit on ergonmics for crews, data collection/analysis for performance management and a superior radial truck design (over its lifetime counting maintenace) that reduces rail wear with some spiffy axle control features. Since railroads are driving the bottom line more than they ever have, the overall value of the loco to the plant and people may grab some incremental sales. GE was first to the game but as stated, no one is really jumping in right now so EMD has very little ground to actually make up. The DC to AC conversion trend seems to be taking a bit of life and Progress Rail/EMD is also making some money off Eco conversions/rebuild market. Keep in mind through that alone, they forge relationships with RRs. That may suggest that there is a sales incentive for CP to buy SD70ACe-T4s because of how well the SD40-2 ECO rebuild program is going. Thats speculation on my part of course but having been in sales, the relationship is a critical aspect of the whole thing. CP tends to by fleets at a time, so we will see what happens when the traffic ticks up and the AC4400CW fleet, some of the older units on the road and most worn out, come to term for either rebuild or replacement. Last point, remember CP replaced the GE radial trucks back to hi-ad on a lot of newer units because of complications/maintenance costs/concerns. Even the newer GEVOs had truck swaps… not a good thing on a product of that size and scope at that age.
I think it is very illuminating that all the Class I railroads buying power yet, though in limited total numbers, are buying every Tier 3 Credit Unit they can get.
Why wouldn’t they though? It’s a proven design whereas the T4 units are less so…and they can only buy those credit units if they buy an equivalent number of T4 units.
20% cheaper, 5% better fuel economy, a known quantity… why not?
YoHo1975 and Northwest, yes indeed! Clearly the railroads feel Tier 3 units are superior for a variety of very good reasons. Granted, Tier 4 regulations are targeted for specific emissions, but it sure seems counterintuitive that burning more fuel is a better outcome.
It’s only counterintuitive if the extra fuel burned offsets the emissions improvement, but given the extreme reductions in NOx, 5% more fuel ends up meaning little.
Plus, by encouraging them through lower costs to buy those units, the government also encourages them to get rid of, or rebuild to better emissions, older units.
For UP and BNSF, the CARB requirements alone make it make sense since that T3 unit is still superior from an emissions perspective to the Dash 9s, 70Ms and AC4400s they might use instead.
You think 5% more fuel doesn’t cost more for a fleet. Last year where I work we used just over 4.7 Million Gallons of ULSD to run our entire fleet for the year at an average cost of 2.50 a gallon for the year came to right around 11.7 Million dollars. Now same fleet size fuel cost and miles but 5% more fuel burned would cost us 600 grand more that we have to cover before we can make a profit. Now the engineers that made these things will claim only a 5% loss in fuel economy well real world and this is based off what happened in the OTR side the railroads are facing a 10% loss minimum in fuel economy. That is what we had happen when EGR alone hit us way back in 2007. If the Railroads ever get hammered with DPF with SCR look for a 20% on top of that for regens.
Who said ANYTHING about the cost of fuel? If you read what I wrote, you’ll see I was discussing Emissions. It is counter intuitive that burning more fuel would lead to less emissions. The cost of Fuel isn’t relevant to that discussion.
Most of the ‘extra fuel being burned’ is likely not related to NOx reduction, but to particulate reduction, which is a very different thing. Hopefully Entropy and some others will discuss the specific technologies used to achieve the Tier 4 final NOx emissions vs. Tier 3, as my understanding of how NOx is reduced in compression-ignition engines is somewhat behind the times.
In the “old days” there had to be a reduction both in peak temperature and effective pressure to keep nitrogen oxidation minimized. In diesels these translated into lower thermal efficiency for a given power-stroke expansion, hence (by extension) more sfc required for a given horsepower output. But I don’t see the increase in sfc just to achieve Tier 4 final NOx over Tier 3 to be in the range of that “5%”, whereas I could easily believe that magnitude of increase if regeneration of large DPFs is being done with active fuel burn.
Why?
First, it depends on whether you’re looking at absolute emissions in grams, or percentage emissions in something like g/hp/h (sorry for mixing units, but that’s what you get in this modern world). A standard which looks at lower emissions per stroke, in an engine which then has to make higher rpm to achieve original shp, unsurprisingly has ‘lower emissions’ by legal definition, but still may easily emit more pollutants per hour than an unmodified version.
Second, it depends on how you define ‘emissions’ (in a pejorative sense of ‘pollutants’ that need to be minimized). In my opinion, particulates are a far worse human health hazard than the marginal incre
To quote the dry humor of law professor, auto enthusiast and blogger Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, “This is the Twenty First Century.”
During the 1960’s, and apart from the “low-hanging fruit” of the PCV system of recycling the crankcase blowby gas into the intake, achieving adequate emission control from automobiles was thought to be impossible, especially to address the photochemical smog and everyone have a cold or sinus infection they never got over or worse in Southern California. That is when people were thinking about dusting off the Doble patents to bring back condensing steam cars with flash boiler or gas turbines or Stiring engines or even electric cars – electric cars, not for “peak oil” or “climate change” or “making better use of renewables” reasons but for point-source smog reasons.
What happened next was the invention of the catalytic converter and the transition to lead-free gasoline, which some in the auto industry thought would never happen, could never happen, it did happen, if not for the catalytic converter then for the concern about lead levels in people. By the 70’s, the thought was that these alternative engines would never get off the ground whereas the emissions from gasoline auto engines could be reduced.
But it was a near thing, the emission regs coming out of the Clean Air Act put the automakers into crisis mode, and 70’s cars were awful from the standpoint of guzzling gas, even the newly introduced small cars to address the “oil crisis”, and their power was feeble and they did odd things when you mashed on the gas pedal.
But then the electronics industry came up with cheap microprocessors, and the 3-way catalyst offered c
What I could probably say in fewer words is that on one hand you have those who argue that the government shouldn’t mandate anything and others who say that not only should the government mandate things, governmental regulators shouldn’t listen the the complaints of the corporate world about the things to be mandated being so very hard to do.
Some things cannot be done – Mr. Nixon declared a “War on Cancer”. Treatments have improved, but the suffering inflicted by cancer remains part of the human condition. Other things can be done, but they are perhaps unnecessarily difficult if put on a “Manhatten Project” crash program basis but given enough time, like 40 years instead of a mere 4 years for engineers to practice their craft, it gets done. No one is talking about electric cars anymore as a necessity of addressing the California smog problem. I guess the emissions of gasoline engines in automobiles is a “solved problem” – all the talk about electric cars is now addressing concerns of either running out of oil, or of not running out of oil and affecting global climate through burning that much oil, emitting CO2 in the process.
But whether it is railroad PTC, Tier 4, or whatever, having the government “push for” a solution on a short timeline is not always the best answer. Like the age-old joke, there are certain timelines you cannot accelerate by assigning more personnel to the activity.
I should clarify that I think it’s pretty much counterintuitive to a layman that a locomotive meeting tier 4 would burn more fuel than one meeting tier 3. Not that it is such to someone with knowledge of internal combustion engines and emissions control. Do we really think the Tier 4 locomotives represent something not sufficiently successful such that we need more engineer years to get to the “solution?” not saying there aren’t better solutions to be engineered, but I don’t think this is a 70s panic either as Paul described. EMD’s problems getting to T4 were likely as much management churn and over reliance on their engine design than anything else. I still think its an interesting counterfactual to ponder what EMD R&D would have been capable had they not been subject to feckless management from GM, then Greenbrier and finally Cat. What could they have done with support and consistency?
[tup] Thank you Paul Milenkovic for your discussions above.[tup]
Throughout these tier 4 discussions I’ve been remembering how cars were in the '70’s. Cars with 400 cu. in. engines got about 8 MPH and would hardly move when you stepped on the gas. They worked it out eventually.