Isn’t the idea behind “GenSets” to have a second (and third) engine to kick in when more power is required, and shut down when not? What would the advantage of a single-engined GenSet be?
Bill
Roger Penske back in the 80’s was an Detroit Diesel Allison distributer in New Jersey. At that time DDA had been losing money for several years and Penske with Daimler- Benz (MTU) backing bought a majority share and within a year showed a $40,000,000 profit. Penske had a tie in with EMD in that they built the larger diesel generator packages along with Allison gas turbines in their Cincinnati plant. They also had service contracts and sold EMD parts from Lodi NJ. In 1990 GM officially announced that EMD was for sale but I guess Penske was busy enough with what he had. Foreign engine manufactures have bought up American truck builders such as Volvo buying White Motors and Komatsu scooped up International Harvester’s former Construction equipment and Hough Division from Dresser Industries to instantly put them in position to compete with Caterpillar. If Daimler Benz- Daimler Chrysler-Daimler Benz didn’t fool around with Chrysler but got EMD they would be in the locomotive business.
Daimler-Chrysler was in the locomotive business, but they got out of it, they had bought Henschel, then they merged their railway business with ABB to form Adtranz. Both then decided to get out of the railway business and they sold Adtranz to Bombardier.
Fuel saving. When it is broke, it doesn’t consume any fuel.
Emissions regulations are forcing the use of less-robust prime movers, and increased shop time to keep all the gewgaws emissions-compliant. Over-the-road trucks are dealing with this stuff first, but EPA and CARB mandates are bringing the problems to the railroads in short order. Emissions will go down, because nothing will be moving.
We’ll have to start a new post on Gen-Set locomotives, a fascinating subject itself. Back to Europe. I did a little checking and it looks like EMD was very influential in getting Europe dieselized as far as it goes as they started to electrify their main lines after WW 2. They could do that since they were nationalized railroads. In countries that didn,t have the were with all to do so the diesel locomotive looked very attractive. Nohab of Sweden built locomotives with EMD components that looks like a double ended F unit back in the 50’s that some of which are still running or are preserved and run throughout Europe. Romania, Ireland, Norway and the former Yugoslavia have been and are good EMD customers. Vossloh has 2 models of diesel electric built with EMD components in 3000 hp and 4000 hp units. Their smaller diesel hydraulic units come with either CAT 3500 series engines or at long last MTU engines probably from Germany but with the value dollar it might be cheaper to get them from Detroit. GE is moving into this market but their engines are too large apparently to fit the English loading gauge so they are building some units with Genbacher engines from Austria. EMD has been hugely successful with the English market Class 66 and are designing an enlarged version for the continent that can accommodate dynamic braking and a better cab.
The relationship between the UK rail industry and EMD is interesting.From my reading as early as the 1950’s one of the major British locomotive manufacturers (English Electric?) attempted to negotiate an agreement with EMD to use engines and electrical gear in units built over there. But the British Government who had nationalised the rails (British Rail) nixed the idea as “not invented here”. Eventually in the 1980’s, a couple of construction materials firms that had an agreement with British Rail to operate their privately owned equipment on BR rails with BR crews bought the first
In the 1950s there was no way that British Railway would have been allowed to buy foreign equipment if there was a domestic alternative, and at the time Britain was one of the world’s largest builders of steam locomotives. Britain was almost bankrupt after WW2 and the balance of trade was a major concern for the government. British manufacturers were strongly encouraged to focus on exports, and even private companies struggled to get import permits for equipment. EMD would have been an obvious source for prime movers etc. when BR decided to convert to diesels, but this would only have been allowed by the British government if they were built under license in the UK (as per MAN/North British Locomotive and Maybach/Bristol-Siddeley). IIRC EMD were not keen on license-building arrangements at the time - which cost them some significant business (e.g. India’s decision to go with locally assembled Alcos instead). As BR was under government control, the government insisted that the dieselisation programme support as many British manufacturers as possible to encourage them to develop new diesel technology which could be exported. This led to an almost unbelievable proliferation of manufacturers being involved in dieselisation: Beyer-Peacock, Birmingham RC&W, Brush Traction, Clayton Equipment, English Electric (Vulcan Foundry, and Robert Stephenson & Hawthorn), Metropolitan-Vickers, North British Loco and Yorkshire Engine all built diesel road locomotives for BR in the period 1957-68, on top of which BR themselves built their own locomotive designs at no less than 7 separate works (Crewe, Darlington, Derby, Doncaster, Eastleigh, Horwich and Swindon). It will be apparant that this was not very efficient, and after the feast of orders in the steam-diesel transition era dried up virtually all of these builders pulled out of the locomotive market - only Brush is still in the picture, and on a fairly small scale.
EMD broke into the UK in
EMD has partnered with DLW (Diesel Locomotive Works) to build under license EMD designed locomotive with 710 engines for over 10 years now. The production rate has been pretty slow but there have been recent announcements by EMD about further cooperation for new models and to step up production. The market for diesel locomotives is expected to grow rapidly in India and GE is trying to get into this market. How much is actually produced in country is not certain. I think DLW is building all the pieces including the diesels from from EMD plans. There was also some mention of “Technology sharing” and since an awful lot of Indian engineers trained in this country, probably an useful source. I think both EMD and GE have similar agreements with builders in China. If there is any compitition it would be in 3 rd world markets such as Africa.
I would sy it in a little different manner ;
Vossloh is actually working toghether with EMD, wich supplies the ‘core’ part of the locomotive (see it here, http://www.vossloh-espana.com/cms/en/products/diesel-electric_locomotives/euro4000/euro4000.html, here http://www.vossloh-espana.com/cms/media/downloads/pdfs/flyer/Vossloh_Espana_EURO4000_freight_us.pdf and here http://www.vossloh-espana.com/cms/media/downloads/pdfs/flyer/Vossloh_Espana_EURO4000_passengers_us.pdf ), and the rest of the engineering side (trucks, carbody) being done by the company. Technically speaking, these engines are soome sort of SD70, but adapted to Europe’s norms and operating procedures.