This is my first post to the Trains forum and I’d like to start by asking a few questions. I apologize in advance if any of these seem redundant or stupid. By way of an introduction, I’ve been a fan of trains as long as I can remember (I just turned 60 a couple weeks ago). I am retired from the USAF and I spent 20 years repairing F-4 and F-16 aircraft. As a young boy, I had an uncle that worked on the C&O railroad out of Plymouth, MI. His house was only a block or two to the Plymouth yards and I can remember when we would visit them, my brother and I would walk the short distance and clamber around until we got chased off (usually not very quickly) I took lots of pictures with my little Kodak Instamatic camera of the trains and freight yards. Sadly, through all of my many moves over the years, the photos have been lost. We were always careful and watchful for trains as at the time, there were lots of freight trains though there from Detroit running north to Saginaw, west to Lansing and south to Toledo. Trains ran all hours of the day and night and they always woke us up in the middle of the night. From what I’ve been told, business has been curtailed quite a lot over the course of the last 40-50 years as the automobile industry has moved on from Detroit to other places. I am also an HO scale enthusiast but lack the room for that particular hobby.
Anyway, enough about that. My questions are pretty general in nature and I’m hoping to get some good answers without sarcasm or scorn.
Regarding the two most typically in service locos, what are the basic differences between the EMD and GE units? I know everyone has a personal preference like Ford vs. Chevy but I’m just looking for a quick (at a glance) way to determine the model types.
Regarding box cars: with the advent of the intermodal transport system, what are are they used for. Since they still require manual loading/unloading, it seems like a fairly inefficient means of transporting f
Well, somebody has to load and unload those containers too, so I don’t think there’s much difference there.
Keep in mind when you see a long train of double-stacked containers that some - perhaps many - of those containers may not be from a US shipper, or going to a US business. It might work out faster / cheaper for say a container of Chinese-made laptops being sent to England to travel by ship from China to California, then across the US to a Texas Gulf port by train, and then be put on another ship to England, rather than making the whole journey on one ship.
[#welcome] aboard! And thank you for your service in the USAF! [bow]
You’ve asked some good questions which our resident professional railroaders are better equipped to answer than I am, so be patient, I’m sure they’ll get to you ASAP.
And remember what we used to say in the service, “The only stupid question is the one you won’t ask!”
The mid-train and end-of-train engines are referred to as distributed power (or DP), and they are radio-controlled.
if used to be that GE units generally had shorter short-hoods than EMD units. So that would apply to older engines you see. However, as for modern engines, I can’t help you; but someone will, I’m sure.
Shipping, before containers, consisted of a shipper loading a vehicle at their plant, shipping the vehicle to a port. At the port when the vessel that is to handle is scheduled to arrive the port steveores would commence to unload the vehicle - package by package to either a warehouse or into the hold of the vessel. The vessel completes its voyage to the port for unloading by steveadors at destination, either to a warehouse or railcar - package by package. The railcar goes to its destination to be unloaded by the consignee’s personnel - package by package. The supply chain consists of many hands and many packages - all subject to loss and/or damage at every transloading operation.
With containers, it gets loaded by the shipper’s personnel, the container gets moved to the port and is either set aside to await its ship or be loaded directly on the ship, stevadores handle the containers at the port. The ship goes to its destination port where the container is unloaded from the vessel and either goes to truck or train to the consignee. The consignee unloads the container. The contents are untouched by anybody while in transit.
It can be difficult to do this in words when it’s so much easier to look at pictures of the different units on a site like railpictures.net (which will let you search by locomotive type) and take note of distinctive features. There have been a couple of threads with pretty good differentiation of ‘spotting features’, and of course there is the Diesel Spotter’s Guide (but I don’t know to what extent that has been revised to contain recent locomotive types).
There is a pronounced difference in sound between the two manufacturers, as until very recently the engines used very different construction. (You can google the EMD 567, 645, and 710 engines, and some of the discussion about the 265H and current 1010 engines for EMD, and the long history of the Cooper-Bessemer design that still shares design elements with the current GEVO engine line.) Here experience (and watching YouTube) is your best friend.
One key question is whether you have a full carload of ‘something’ and want to ship it cheaply in bulk to a location that has a siding and dock. There are plenty of bulk shippers for whom an end-door limited-height container is restrictive. We’ve had a number of threads specifically about advantages of dedicated railcars, for example in the fresh-produce and frozen-meat segments, but until Kalmbach fixes the ‘search community’ function it’s a crapshoot to find them. I would start by PMing user ‘greyhounds’ and having him refer you to some of his threads regarding this.
I met a guy just today who retired from CSX a few years ago. I asked him if he had a preference between EMD and GE…and he said EMD.
I asked him why, and he claimed that the ladders to get into a GE were straight up verticsal climb, while the steps to get into an EMD are inclined like a staircase.
Said it made a big difference when you are carrying a bag. I was surprised that was the extent of his choice between the two. Anyone else ever hear that as the main explanation?
Everyone has their own expectations on any piece of equipment.
I suspect had your inquiry gone further he likely would have called both brands a POS for a host of other reasons - thus his preference for the step solution of one over the other.
Boxcars work very well when they do not involve trans-loading. By this, I mean that the beginning and end of the shipping route are all on a railroad. But if a shipper or a destination is not on a railroad, trucks start getting involved. And both domestic containers and trailers start looking advantageous.
Containers, by the way, also come in two kinds: international and domestic. The former are usually 20 or 40 feet long (45 feet, occasionally). Domestic, these days, tend to be 53 feet. They rarely intermingle.
International containers must be able to be stacked something like 6 or 8 high. Domestic only 2. International containers must generally be able to fit in standardized guideways in the hold of a ship. They are only 40’ long. Width is also similarly restricted. Domestic containers only have to fit on a trailer or railcar–they are never shipped side-to-side, so width is less critical. They only are stacked two-high, so they can be more lightly made.
As was already noted, comparing pictures of the different locomotive models is the best way to spot differences.
Out in the field, when they are working hard, the most noticeable difference is the sound. The EMD 2-stroke screams like a jet engine and is very smooth idling, while the GE 4-strokes have a pronounced ‘chug’ when working hard and rattle a lot when idling.
The Tier-IV engines from both builders sound very similar, which makes sense as both the EMD 1010 and the Tier-IV GEVO are V12 4-stroke engines with exhaust recirculation. Their sound is kind of a mix of the previous engines, with the rough, rattling idle of a older GE, and the jet engine scream of a EMD at full throttle.
I find one feature that seems to be easy to spot is the radiators. Otherwise, locos are kind of like cars these days - you have to find a badge somewhere to figure out who made it…
Older locomotives, like older cars, are easier to tell apart.
And, with some cars, you have to know which maker applies which fancy name to the car. Manufacturers formerly were glad to put there names where people could see them…
Today’s locomotives have the same function - haul maximum tonnage, reliably with minimum fuel consumption and maintenance.
Today’s automobiles function is to haul its passenger(s) through air, reliably with minimum fuel consumption and maintenance.
Since the manufacturers of both locomotives and autos are facing the same obstacles for their products - the products in each category tend to look the same as they are all trying to be the best answer to the same question.
In prior generations Form was the driving element of designs; now it is Function.
A lot of what he said was true once, many years ago when EMD was the best. Not anymore in the wide nose era. EMD redesigned their steps on the SD70Ace variants. They actually made them worse. Both now are more like a ‘staircase’ but GE’s are better. EMD, after complaints, added an extra step. But instead of repositioning all the steps to be equal distance apart, they just added one between two of the existings ones. It’s almost a tripping hazard the way they did it.
EMD on the SD70Ace decided to place some circuit breakers and the battery knife switch in two cabinets along the long hood, as well as some on the back wall. GE, and previous EMD designs, had all that in the cab on the back wall. EMD heard the complaints on that and has moved the circuit breakers into the cab. The battery knife switch is still out along the long hood. There’s no better feeling than walking back to start an engine in the rain, getting your gloves nice and soaked an
Thanks for the feedback, I was hoping that actual T&E guys would chime in with their personal observations.
As far as my source’s frame of mind, he seemed like an okay guy to me, but he did seem a tad overly non-chalant to me…in a “hey it’s just what I did for a living” sort of way. I’ve known garbage men who described their job with more enthusiasm than this guy.
I notice for some unaccountable reason no one has mentioned the trucks. On almost all EMDs since the 1990s there are very distinctive HTCR radial trucks of distinctive appearance; the GEs since introduction of the dash-9 series either have ‘rollerblade’ trucks or their weird proprietary radial -steering arrangement (which is unmistakably theirs and evident from almost any distance).
Learn these three types from pictures and you’ll have no difficulty discriminating a huge percentage of the units you see.
There are other auditory clues. The dash-9 GEs and I believe some early GEVOs had a motor controller on their air compressor that would produce a very distinctive ‘whoop!’ sound when the compressor started.
To better understand the ‘vertical step’ complaint you should look at pictures of early U-boats (GE Universal series, like U25B or U36C). As I recall, on some of these not only were the steps completely vertical, they were recessed openings in a flat plate like the steps in the side of a passenger cab unit, and there were more of them to get to the higher deck height - I think I remember five on at least a couple of C-trucked examples. It would be misery to inch your way up these following the one-hand-planted-at-all-times rule with a grip.