Reminds me of when Houston had power problems following Tropical Storm Allison, and jet engines were loaded onto flatbed trucks and parked downtown to power the skyscrapers.
Note that the GAG is used to suffocate coal seam and similar fires, by injecting a mix of water and fuel into the jet exhaust (essentially an afterburner with water-injection to keep the exhaust temperature low), and then providing a pipe of very-low-oxygen gas stream.
Jet Turbines are actually surprisingly good for power plants. They run on all sorts of fuel and are very efficient. I believe GE refurbs some old airplane engines into power plants.
Combined cycle gas turbines are about the most efficient least polluting non-renewable power we have available. They are basically using a gas turbine as a heat source for a steam turbine engine.
Unfortunately you aren't going to load that onto a truck so that would be a straight gas turbine which is great for power to weight, cost and reliability but not efficiency.
Jet turbines have a much narrower range of efficient operational speeds than combustion engines. The Navy figured this out circa 1900. For emergency power where you have basically unlimited potential load and can add more stuff to ensure you won't need to throttle below your sweet spot and don't care about wasting fuel to keep the lights on anyway that's fine but freight locomotives and shipping stick to their legacy piston rings because the overall system efficiency winds up being greater in their use cases.
I doubt that would be allowed by the current administration. Even actual power plants that don't meet current environmental standards were restricted last week in Texas. They were allowed to run, but required to sell power for no less than 10x the usual price.[1]
It seems like a diesel train or jet engine would be even worse for the environment, per kWh, and even less likely to get federal approval.
> Once at its destination and hooked in, its V12 had to be run at a specific, constant rpm' to generate AC current at 60 hertz, the frequency used by most North American utilities.
I don't think this is exactly right. I'm sure it wasn't consistent either, but few loads really cared too much.
From the article's link, about a different locomotive doing the same thing:
> Conrail actually had a set of standing instructions on how to provide quasi-commercial power from a locomotive. For an SD40-2, you attach to the bus before the diodes. Operating in notch 6 runs the generator at 647 RPM. Since the AR10 is a 10 pole machine, that gives 64.7 Hz power. You could tweak the governor to get it closer to 60 Hz if you really wanted to, but for powering everything but clocks, it's close enough. I think the method for regulating the voltage was to disconnect the load regulator from it's governor-powered vane motor and dialing the voltage in manually. The output is 3 phase power. Max output in notch 6 is about 1000KW. If the avg home draws 2-3 KW on the avg, that'd power several hundred homes.
Not an engineer but I used to sell generators. I believe constant rpm eng/alternator is pretty common practice. From memory and a quick Google search, 1800 rpm produces 60hz and 1500 produces 50hz in newer alternators. I'm unfamiliar with these engine/alternator combos so they likely operate slightly differently.
Most power generating units operate at a relatively fixed rpm for longevity and will ramp a little during heavy load.
Older/basic generators would run at fixed frequency to generate the correct frequency. I believe the voltage is regulated by regulating the field strength in the rotor.
Modern generators have inverters that handle the output and regulates the 60Hz/110V or 50Hz/220V etc. In this case the RPM is controlled by the wattage required (with a min and max RPM). Motor -> alternator -> inverter -> load
True, but that is changing. Inverters are not very expensive anymore, provide cleaner power, and can match the frequency of the something else allowing you to put several generators in parallel and disconnected one for maintenance. They also allow running lower RPM which at lighter loads can save fuel/money. (A constant rpm generator often uses more fuel at 50% load than at 80% load!)
Inverter generators can also sell power back to the grid. To pay for the fuel you need more than the typical retail price of electric, so this is only worth it if you have a need for a backup generator anyway. However if you have this need talk to the power company, they often will give you a discount because when there are load issues (See Texas last week), and the ability to add power to the grid in this time will be something they are interested in.
Today most large generators are still constant RPM, but I don't expect that to last.
Why would a constant-RPM generator not be able to feed into a grid?
Also, you can run them in parallel without problems, as long as you keep the governors from oscillating.
But proper PID tuning and sensing architecture should turn that into a non-issue.
Larger engines btw. just disable cylinders for part-load operation.
Diesel engines for power generation will have a governor control that sets the throttle based on the load to maintain whatever rpm is required for 60 Hz (constant speed control). The load in this scenario is uncontrolled and the genset simply follows it.
A diesel locomotive's engine controls are about producing the right amount of power to match the operator's throttle control. Electrical frequency at the generator (alternator) terminals is irrelevant since that output is being rectified to DC anyways. This is great for a train, because it means you can have full power at any speed - the speed of your train and the speed of your engine are completely decoupled from each other. But if you now connect this normally variable frequency AC output directly to 60 Hz loads, you will need to figure out how to set the throttle to best maintain something close to 60 Hz and your power output will be limited.
If you buy a large engine for a generator the manufacture will have one pin on the ECU for the 50/60hz switch which just changed the RPM. Generators are not enough of a market for the manufactures to make their own engines (unless they have other divisions that also need an engine for something else) that meet emissions, but they are large enough a market overall that companies that make engines want to get in on the extra profits they can by selling to the market (they get to spread the cost of emissions development across more engines), and the 50/60hz RPM needs are only a few hours to code/test on top of all the other work they are doing anyway.
There may be minimum quantities in your engine order, though the contract will provide for spare parts which might get you a single replacement many years after the generator is manufactured (if the rest of the engine is still available)
I understand that more load reduces frequency and less load raises frequency.
Maybe something got lost in translation and "specific, constant RPM" was describing (a feedback loop of) "watch the frequency and keep it steady" as opposed to "always use this value"?
--
Also, wow. Seriously, wow. A locomotive running flat out could power several hundred homes. Transportation is expensive, both from a relative cost perspective, and also from a resource(-wastefulness) perspective. Electric (specifically grid-connected) trains also suddenly make a bit more sense.
> Transportation is expensive, both from a relative cost perspective, and also from a resource(-wastefulness) perspective.
It really isn't. That locomotive running flat out may use a lot of energy. But it's also moving an enormous amount of freight, making the energy used per unit mass fairly small. For instance, CSX estimates it can move about 1 ton of freight 492 miles per gallon of diesel: https://www.csx.com/index.cfm/about-us/the-csx-advantage/fue...
Your trip to the store and back will probably use more energy.
Running rail relatively slowly and on the level is low-power. Put hills or other load factors (start/stop, speed up / slow down, even wind) into the mix and it can go up. Elevation most especially --- railroads will go up to a thousand kilometers out of a straight-line route to avoid elevation gains.
A passenger car should get 20-30 miles (30-50 km) per gallon, so unless your store run is several towns over (or you're in the sticks), probably less energy moving a ton 500 miles by rail. Though yes, personal autos are, relative to size and cargo capacity, profligate energy users.
I think you are forgetting brakes. There is absolutely no way a train is free-rolling it down a hill. They will be on brakes the entire time - dynos and air brakes - so you are "getting back" a lot of those joules in the form of electricity and heat, not momentum.
Not only them. Almost all newer EMU's for regional/commuting here do it, too. And I don't like it because I can hear the fucking chirping of the electronics when they do that. Which is *very annoying' when I have to ride them.
2. If you can't get it up, you won't be going down.
A 110 car unit coal train grosses 143 tons per car for a 15,750 ton gross trainset weight, excluding locos. Metric is nearly the same, I'll round to 15,000 tonne.
Lifting that 1,000 metres (3,300 feet) requires about 150 gigajoules of energy, or the energy equivalent of over 3.5 tonnes of oil. You're not going to recover that fuel going downhill.
(Rough numbers for an approximate answer, but it's a lot of energy.)
The highest elevation mainline crossing in the US was on the Union Pacific Railroad, Tennessee Pass (10,240 feet, 3,121 m), built in 1882 and retired in 1997. Today it's the San Luis & Rio Grande Railroad, La Veta Pass (9,242 feet, 2,816 metres).
Diesel electric locomotives don't use regeneration because it doesn't make much sense, not because it's not feasible. Locomotives that have regenerative braking actually do exist.
3.5 tons of fuel for 15 000 tons is 230g of fuel per ton, or around a tenth of a gallon per ton.
So even on the highest climb, assuming none of the energy is used on the downhill, that's 3 tenths of a gallon per fuel per ton for the climb.
For context, a car's engine could move the average car 5.4 miles on flat ground with the energy required for a locomotive to lift the same car up 3km.
As you can see, it's really not that much energy. Which is why regenerative braking isn't used.
Need to have somewhere to put that regenerated energy. Either overhead wire/third rail, or some sort of 'tender' with storage like the old steamers had for coal and some water.
Certainly, in general it's done via overhead wire or third rail and feeds energy back into the grid. It's not worth it in general when those aren't already present.
Well, my hybrid electric car gets, on a summer day, about 70 km per 10 kWh charge. So if the locomotive can produce about 24000 kWh in a day, it could power 2400 35 km round-trip commutes.
Now a freight train will run at, I don't know, 120 km/h? So, theoretically, it could run 2 880 km in a day. As we can see, that's a lot less than the combined 168 000 km 2400 hybrid cars could drive.
So if we're comparing a train pulled by a locomotive like this to single-occupant hybrid electric cars, the train would have to transport 60 people to be about equivalent in efficiency. That seems very doable, you could fit that in a single train car. Also the 1000 kW power output is the peak output, I can't imagine a locomotive would be anywhere near it's max power very often.
Did I goof in my calculations? I may well have! But based on these numbers, trains seem pretty efficient.
Freight train implies cargo transport, while you’re generally correct from my point of view, I think the more apt comparison would be freight train vs. semi
Also, looks like your car gets ~230Wh / mile, that’s pretty efficient compared to teslas, what kind of EV do you have? Are teslas just that inefficient or are you including ICE hybrid engine use in that measurement? Model 3 gets ~315 - 350 Wh / mile
It's an Opel Ampera, i.e. a Chevy Volt. That range, fully electric, is the best I've reliably gotten out of it, attainable on summer days (no heating!) driving on slower country roads. Highways and wintertime are a different story - this time of year I get maybe 45 km per charge. And currently it won't even run on battery only since it's so cold the car insists on intermittently running the engine for heat.
I used to work in the freight railroad industry. One instructive thing to demonstrate how efficient rails are, which I got to try once or twice: one person can move a fully loaded railcar with a pinch bar (basically a crowbar with an extra lever element) behind a wheel.
“ Electric (specifically grid-connected) trains also suddenly make a bit more sense.”
On a first glance it would appear so, but it a terrible idea in practice. At least for freight. Commuter trains are often electric (15 Hz? I forget), mostly for local air quality problems.
Train engines are incredibly efficient. Only the largest marine engines are better. These engines are large enough that they approach the thermal efficiency of the thermal plant producing electricity.
So no real gains for CO2 emissions. (Wind and solar don’t count at a first approx. since we’re talking about marginal E use. The train not connected on to the grid frees up production at a thermal plant to lower its production)
But you also loose a lot of resiliency. In extremis, a diesel Trains don’t need anything to run. In case of an ice storm you have to rebuild big infrastructure. Train can help you transport that if they’re independent.
Electric commuter trains have other major benefits. They stop and start frequently, and electric train sets can accelerate and decelerate faster than diesel. On the upcoming electric Caltrain, this will save quite a bit of time for long commutes. I believe that many electric trains can also regenerative brake. They can operate safely in long tunnels, unlike diesel. I suspect that diesel locomotives are considerably less efficient under the varying load conditions of a commuter train than they are for long freight routes.
And, as far as I know, all major high speed trains are electric.
> electric train sets can accelerate and decelerate faster than diesel
All locomotives use electric motors for traction. Diesel locomotives have a motor that turns a generator to produce electricity for the traction motors on the wheels. A diesel locomotive can stop and start just as fast as a fully electric locomotive, but commuter trains are relatively lighter than freight trains. Diesel locomotives can also use regenerative braking.
> A diesel locomotive can stop and start just as fast as a fully electric locomotive,
The Caltrain electrification plan respectfully disagrees. I am not remotely an expert, but I would guess there are two major factors at play. First, a lot of commuter electric trains are multiple units and have no locomotive. This means that more of the wheels can supply traction, which presumably increases the traction-to-weight ratio of the whole train set. Secondly, I think that efficient diesel generators tend to be most efficient at a specific output power, whereas a commuter train runs over a wide range of output powers. A grid-powered electric train set can briefly draw several MW from the grid without a major loss of efficiency.
To make a third factor a bit more explicit: there's a limit to the power you can apply to a wheel before it slips on the rail. Having more powered wheelsets means the total possible power is increased.
Commuter trains usually use multiple units, and metro trains always do -- they start and stop often, so the improved acceleration is a benefit.
Long distance trains can be multiple units, or a single locomotive: the time saving is less useful on a train that stops infrequently, so lower capital + maintenance costs win (plus passenger comfort, it's quieter inside).
Electric locomotives on freight trains are pretty common in Europe probably because they can have a much higher power output in a smaller unit.
A pair of TGV power cars, one at each end of the train, has a max power of 12MW at full acceleration, you would need about 14 of these diesel locos for the same output.
The power here is 25kV at 50Hz apart from some commuter lines. Also modern electric trains can use regenerative braking to dump the braking energy back into the grid. It’s pretty common.
14 diesel locs for one TGV trainset; nice way of showing how energy-guzzling high speed trains are compared to classic trains. It's still better than an airplane, but not by that much.
Actually it is a heck of a lot better than an airplane.
14 diesel locomotives sounds like a lot, but that is absolute maximum power, and a TGV carries a ton of people. On routes where they are very inefficient (London-Paris as an example), you're looking at around 10 times more emissions by plane (plane 122kg vs high speed train 11kg.) On routes where they are efficient, you're looking at more around 100x more emissions by plane (65kg Paris to Lyon by plane vs 0.7kg by TGV.)
You'll notice that you can cross the whole of France, 1001km Lille-Marseille, for just about 1.6 kilograms CO2 per person per trip. Try that in a plane!
Right but its pulling 12MW to accelerate you to 200MPH in a reasonable amount of time, it's not sitting at full power for the whole trip. I think they are capable of >300mph if you open it up to full power and see what happens. Also I got the number wrong a TGV duplex transports about 500 people with a max power of 8MW. A Eurostar is 750 people with max power of 12MW.
If you really want to have your mind blown, consider that one locomotive can move the equivalent of 400 trucks, and can be run in tandem to move more.
Trains are similar to solar panels... they are operationally super efficient but require a large capital investment. Where they work, they are magic.
Electric infrastructure is even more capital intensive, i would guess that if using was even marginally more efficient, it would have been implemented as railroads benefit from that efficiency. Equipment exists to accept grid power in diesel (Amtrak trains pulling into Penn station in NYC switch).
I think the main motivations for electrifying a railway are:
- flexibility and independence of power source. Switzerland can use hydropower, France can use nuclear power, many places could use coal power and not worry about losing rail transport in an oil shortage.
- reduced maintenance costs (no diesel engines; reduced weight of the trains causes less wear on the track)
- more power, i.e. faster trains, increasing the capacity of the railway line. Passengers approve, and freight trains can accelerate better meaning it's easier to run them between passenger trains.
The US and Canada have less to gain with these than many other countries.
> Also, wow. Seriously, wow. A locomotive running flat out could power several hundred homes.
That's exactly what happened in my hometown, which generated power via a locomotive that was literally up on blocks. You could hear it grinding away from quite a distance. They only got connected to the grid when I was in my 20s and long gone.
I think the only actual reason why the power frequency has to be precise is so all the power plants can be synchronized. But in an emergency situation, you don't really care if it's 60 or 65 Hz...
Alternating phases would be hooked up to one phase or the other, with negative phase poles connected backwards. I know traction motors are brushed, so probably the generators are as well. If that's the case then you should be able to just bolt new wires on (brushes are consumables, so they are easily replaceable).
edit: managed to misread your conclusion as it would be 110 Hz, lol.
I wonder what they did with the 5 phases? Use them asymmetrically and let the engine struggle with the unbalanced load? Also it seems like this feed would be no good for powering 3 phase motors, or really any phase-phase load. Although maybe city hall back then was only on single phase power, and they could balance circuits between all 5 phases, with the probable addition of temporary electric heaters etc.
There’s some room for error, but frequency is the a very important metric for the utility to get right. The reason is that motors start to burn when the frequency is significantly off of the design f [1].
So, the blower in your furnace will die (-> no heat in the home). Your laundry machines’ motor burn. You ovens convection oven burns. Etc.
You’re better of with rolling black ours (Texas forgot the “rolling” part) than get the frequency wrong.
[1] think of a motor as an LCR circuit. There’s a natural f, and if youre far from it it will cause heating of the windings
I love this. There is something about the power of train engines that is very appealing, even though there might be other bigger engines out there. Maybe it is the pulling aspect due to them being in front instead of driving that makes me think of them like iron horses.
"Iron horse" is an iconic literary term (currently transitioning into an archaic reference) for a steam locomotive, originating in the early 1800s when horses still powered most machinery, excepting windmills and stationary steam engines. The term was common and popular in both British and North American literary articles.
>>> Big business, after all, should be expected to put its interests first, no matter the cost to the public, be that a delayed train or weeks-long power outages in the dead of winter.
Why is it that every article in the world feels like it needs to take a crap on 'big business' these days. Obviously the U.S. could do with a bit of trust busting and regulation that serves the little guy. But the world is different that in was in the 50's and 60's. Corporations compete on a multinational stage, and the big players are absolutely huge. The U.S. can either serve their interests and the U.S. population can reap the rewards of big business existing in the U.S., or we can force big corps to shut down. The latter would place the U.S. in a terrible position for many reasons.
It would be nice to see the U.S. government incentivize heavily small businesses. Perhaps they could do a 'reverse graduation incentive structure' or something where the smaller the businesses the more you get tax breaks (or some other scheme - I can think of several). But we just can't 'shut big business down' and then expect to remain competitive on a world stage.
> It would be nice to see the U.S. government incentivize heavily small businesses.
Good luck with that. We're in the middle of a health crisis that's being used to funnel as much money from small businesses to the biggest ones as possible. Americans' cynicism is well-earned.
Big business sucks in a plethora of ways, but I share your overall reaction. The coda of corporate resentment takes away from the article and dumps on Amtrak for no useful reason.
It's not necessarily big business, but short-term incentives of big business that may not align with any other stakeholders than the current stockholders. Big businesses are necessary to enact the scale of change we need (it takes a huge number of people to design and build electronics, operate heavy industry, etc), but it's the misaligned incentives to meet rather arbitrarily-set quarterly earnings, and the possibility of being sued if a company does not pursue that goal (if publicly traded), that drive the worst parts of capitalism.
https://www.haya.qc.ca/storm.htm The following quote is from halfway down the page there’s a first-hand account with some more details than I saw on Wikipedia. Not sure if French sources would have more:
> There was an interesting phenomenon - a locomotive used as a generator. Railway locomotives use a diesel engine to drive an electric generator and this power in many cases is AC. A 2000 horsepower CN locomotive was taken off the tracks in Boucherville and literally driven down the street to the Boucherville town hall. With the locomotive sitting on the street out front the generator is providiing power to the city offices. The locomotive is set to the third notch on the throttle which sets the engine speed such that it will provide 60 hertz power. At this speed it will generate about 500 horsepower or 375 kilowatts of power - enough for several buildings. There is a second locomotive parked on the street near the grade crossing which is held in reserve. It was supposed to be used to power the shelter further down the street but an intervining overpass which would not support the 260,000 pound locomotive ended that idea. Nonetheless this is an interesting way to solve a problem.
> In an interesting discussion on the internet on this subject it was mentioned that on the Devco Railway on Cape Breton Island there are four locomotives specially designed to act as generators in an emergency. Emergency planners may, in the future, wish to look at these locomotives since they could be quite useful in large scale emergencies.
> With a friend I went to Boucherville On January 17 to see this spectacle and met some other friends there. There were folks coming from as far as Sherbrooke to see the sight which is most unusual. It was fun to see folks having their pictures taken in front of the engine. There was a soldier in the cab at all times to make sure no one got too close to the electrical connections or otherwise got themselves in trouble. I doubt that anyone is likely to steal the locomotive!
Please don't take the baitiest part of an article and rush into the comments to be provoked by it. This is against the site guidelines—for example, this one:
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Well, if I have remembered correctly, train power equipment is not that fundamentally different from dedicated electrical power generating equipment.
In fact, I believe for a lot of engines, the mechanical energy rarely is used directly to power wheels -- it usually (for diesel-electric, for example) is powering a generator that then is feeding electricity to motors + wheels.
So, maybe not such a stretch to take the power/electricity off to other purposes?
Correct. Modern locos basically receive AC, convert it to DC, then convert it back to AC for the traction motors. Whether they receive AC through a pantograph, or a self-contained engine + generator, doesn’t really make a whole lot of difference.
The power generation is fundamentally the same as in marine purposes, too. In fact, the modern engines such as the EMD 710 or GE 7FDL, often come in non-mobile stationary/marine operation configurations for these purposes.
I don't know of any that actually have mechanical linkages.
The whole point is to use the alternator + electric motors as a CVT basically. You want the engine to be able to use it's maximum power at any given speed. The amount of gears you'd need for a mechanical transmission for the big freight locomotives would be absurd.
Correct, most modern locomotives are diesel-electric and not fundamentally different from a large standby generator that would be found in a hospital or data center. The locomotive has the great advantage of being easy to move, although a bit of MacGyvering would have been needed on the control/operation side since a traction power engine probably doesn't have a ready-made 60 Hz governor control.
Some replies already, but just to add (sorry, train nerd here).. It's not for a lot of locomotives, but virtually all locomotives. Early diesel locomotives tried to use a mechanical transmission but this mostly failed because you can't scale the technology up well, and this is my own speculation but I think you need to be able to shift under full load. The transition from steam didn't happen until diesel-electric was invented. This combination is also good for reducing wear on brakes, as you can use the motor as a generator and resistors to dissipate power as heat. I don't know of a locomotive that uses regenerative braking, but it's used on some passenger trains in Japan. Not by storing energy in batteries, but by feeding into the local power grid!
Diesel-hydraulic was also tried for a while but was largely unsuccessful. For special applications, like maintenance equipment or moving things in a railyard, you can still find some diesel-mechanical and diesel-hydraulic equipment.
If a freight train stops, depending on its length, it must reverse to add slack between cars. Then it starts by effectively pulling each car one by one. You can hear it as a bang-bang-bang if you're nearby, depending on the coupling method between cars. If a train loses momentum on a hill, it may have to reverse and start from the bottom.
Ah, just seemed surprising they had all these parts to step down the voltage and everything but didn't have power cables. But I guess it is what it is.
The distribution infrastructure for distances above a few hundred meters(yards) typically uses 10 or 30 kV, and the former is fairly easy for pantograph-powered locomotives. So if the locomotive can optionally use a pantograph instead of it's diesel (tunnels and urban areas on the east coast come to mind), it has a transformer between the low-voltage traction motors / diesel generator rail and the pantograph rail (15~25 kV, typically).
The alternator and transformer don't care about the lower voltage, except that their current capability won't change much (so you loose power capability).
So I'd assume they should be able to use existing power lines from the other side of the overpass to the school, possibly after isolating that segment from the rest of the grid.
This might also connect some other buildings, but typical transformer ratings here (DE, urban, residential; are a few hundred kVA. So
(If you don't know what kVA means, "kW felt by wires/ transformer/generator, but not the diesel" is a rough summary sufficient for this scenario.
(Don't worry, it's neither wrong nor misleading. If you disagree with that statement, elaborate and feel free to downvote.))
I grew up in that town.
To reach the high-school from the track, you have to cross an overpass. They were concerned about the weight of the train. The school is is about 1.4 km from the overpass.
If the overpass was the issue you'd think they would have realized that before moving the second locomotive at all. One would assume you'd at least plan out the route in advance.
The concerted effort to smear Ted Cruz for going on a preplanned vacation before a winter storm (no one could have predicted the fallout, this was effectively a black swan) feels really cheap. It also bothers me to see it shoehorned where it isn't actually relevant. There's a serious media problem in the US.
And that's bad for everyone - regardless of whether you personally agree with the usual slant, the fact that about half the country has lost trust in media because of this transparent, deliberate bias, should concern everyone. It is a failure on the part of news organizations.
I live near there and remember going to see the train in the town’s center when it happened. I remember seeing the wheel’s tracks in the asphalt, as they drove the loco directly on it, and was impressed at how shallow they were. I would have thought the train would tear the asphalt apart, but it was not the case, at least not when going in straight line.
They didn't, it moved under its own power! However, trains can't steer, so according to a user in the forum this article is based on, they used a crane to lift the ends into place to aim it.
More importantly, it had nothing to do with CN, which is not a "Canadian Amtrak" or even an Amtrak competitor. CN is a publicly-traded freight rail company that doesn't currently operate passenger service. There are plenty of those in the US besides CN (which also operates a bit in the US): Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, etc.
So the train moved under its own power on the asphalt? The train cannot steer, right? So they had to get the direction just right when moving it onto the street from the train tracks... impressive!
Is nothing short of amazing, there are some pictures with engineers going down into the cylinders with stepladders... 1800 liters / cylinder displacement.
The last paragraph on Amtrak has nothing to do with CN or the rest of the article. Either the author is just unaware of Canadian National or they chose to include an unrelated point on Amtrak for some reason.
CN is not a "Canadian Amtrak" or even an Amtrak competitor. It's a publicly-traded freight rail company that doesn't currently operate passenger service. The US obviously has analogs: Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, etc.
Like Amtrak, VIA is a federal government-owned operator of intercity passenger rail services. And just like Amtrak, it operates mostly on tracks owned by private freight railways such as CN.
Did the last paragraph change? It calls CN, the Canadian Nation Railway, a "national rail provider" NOT "Canadian Amtrak". A rail provider can provide either freight or passenger. The words "Canadian Amtrak" don't even appear in the article.
Quotes are commonly used to mark a specific novel phrase. I was not intending to imply that it was a phrase from the article.
> The article is saying Amtrak, a half baked VIA, is the closest thing they, in Texas, have to CN.
I disagree with the interpretation, and this claim is still wrong.
First of all, the part I quoted makes a statement about the US, not just Texas. I realize that the previous sentence mentions Texas, but this sentence is clearly naming the country as a whole.
Second, if the article is saying that, this claim would also be incorrect. There are actual rail providers that own significant amounts of railway in Texas, and Amtrak (like VIA Rail) is not one of them.
> If my buddy has a Humvee and I say, "Unfortunately, the closest thing I have is a Schwinn", I'm not saying their Humvee is a bicycle.
Yes. Unfortunately for the author, the US has multiple Humvee equivalents depending on the region, so saying that the "closest thing I have is a Schwinn" is just false when Union Pacific (among others) exists in Texas and is in the same market as Canadian National.
Yes: Update: Feb. 23, 10:12 a.m. ET: An erroneous reference to CN as a national rail provider has been removed, the railway having been publicly traded since 1995.
It was a crown corporation (like Canada Post is) until 1995. I checked the date since I wondered if it was already privatized. CN and CP are really recognized and somewhat romanticized brands in Canada as they are a really important part of history, to connect the country from East to West. Are the freight railroads not well known in the US?
One funny thing is the Canadian CN is..CN. It has extensive operations in the US
The point of that last paragraph is the sarcastic last sentence:
> Big business, after all, should be expected to put its interests first, no matter the cost to the public, be that a delayed train or weeks-long power outages in the dead of winter.
If CN is a business, kudos to them for contributing to the civic good during a time of crisis, unlike so many American corporations.
Yeah, it has little to do with the current situation in Texas, either. While it was a nasty week, there were always public buildings (including event centers, schools, hospitals, etc.) which still had power. The blackout came for anyone who was not on a grid with such a high-priority building. So there was never a time when hauling a train engine to town hall would have made sense, in Texas last week. Still an interesting story, though, if one subtracts the last paragraph.
As of Feb. 17, energy was out for 2.7 million households, officials said. With freezing temperatures expected through the weekend, getting the lights back on will be a slow process, as the state has lost 40% of its generating capacity, with natural gas wells and pipelines, along with wind turbines, frozen shut.
So extremely quick and dirty: If we moved to passive solar, we could potentially save as much as 10 percent of energy usage and it would be the part that's really critical in a crisis induced by an extreme weather event: The lifesaving ability to stay warm without power.
With climate change making extreme weather events more common, promoting passive solar ought to be a policy around the world. It also helps disrupt that positive feedback loop that we run the AC more because of climate change and running the AC more helps promote climate change.
Solar won't help in a winter storm when the sun is not shining and all your panels are covered with snow. Wind power also tends to go down when there's too much wind.
Everyone loves to pick on air conditioning, but the recent disaster has shown that heating is also a huge problem. As your statistics show, heating can consume more energy than air conditioning depending on the region. AC only needs to lower the indoor temperature by 10-20F, whereas heating requirements can exceed 50F. This makes it a much harder problem to reliably produce the amount of energy needed to keep people from freezing.
Climate change can bring not only hotter summers but also colder winters and more energetic storms. We desperately need methods to generate clean energy even during extreme weather. Especially during extreme weather.
I’d love to know the all-in energy and ecological footprint of building for passive solar. I could imagine it is significant.
Sure you save lots of energy over its lifetime but you likely have a huge deficit to start with.
I doubt that, but I will add a link to this comment to my file and see if I can find anything when I get around to trying to do some kind of write up about it.
Though generally one gets to a point of diminishing returns. It's probably better to get to a certain efficiency point, and then throw some solar/PV panels on the roof and become 'net zero', producing the electricity you need on-site:
Heat Pump technology is pretty awesome and more efficient, when your circumstances and weather patterns support it. Since they move heat from one place to another, they have to work harder as the difference between the temperatures increase.
The ideal solution is a ground-source heat pump, where a closed loop is buried underground to take advantage of the very stable and reasonable subsurface ground temperature.
If you can afford to put in a geothermal ground loop and use a heat pump, you can have a very stable heating and cooling solution that is energy efficient and works well in a super-insulated passive home.
The US Army had a nuclear power barge which tied up in Panama and provided power to the Canal Zone for several years. See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH-1A
Query whether Navy ships could be tied up in Houston and connected to the grid.
I believe the US navy has the the ability for many ships to supply power to the city when docked. One job of the Navy is to go to a port near a disaster and help the city recover, so if the ship can supply the city with needed power that is very helpful in some disasters. (when it isn't moving it has a lot of spare power) Most ports don't have the ability to use power from a ship (and even if they do it is questionable if that will survive the disaster)
It was done in the late 1920s/early 1930s with the aircraft carrier Lexington, which powered Tacoma, WA, during a drought which affected hydroelectric generation.
The thing is that Lexington was very unusual for an American ship in having turboelectric propulsion, where the steam turbines were connected to generators which produced power for the electric motors which turned the propellers. Most US Navy steamships- including all of the modern nuclear-powered ones- use a mechanical transmission to connect their steam turbines to the propellers directly. They do run some generators from the turbines for so-called 'hotel load'- operating the ship's electrical systems- but the output of these is relatively limited.
Some other countries' nuclear submarines do have turboelectric propulsion- I think the Russians have used submarines to power isolated Siberian cities in emergencies- and the USN's new Columbia-class SSBNs will. But the amount of electricity you could get from any current US Navy ship would be limited.
Interesting... Why has this mechanical transmission setup persisted so long in American Navy ships? Perhaps it is more efficient? I would naively expect it to be more expensive, require more maintenance, and be less flexible than a diesel-electric setup like trains use.
IIRC the weight of the generators was a big problem- particularly when the Washington Naval Treaty had to be taken into account.
The US tried building turboelectric submarines twice, but in both cases they were heavier and slower than equivalents powered by geared turbines. Apparently advances in electric motor/generator technology in recent years have reached the point where it's practical again.
> 131.4-liter, single-turbo diesel V12s making some 1,950 horsepower
I'm sure this engine has been optimized for different factors, and it's likely a fairly old locomotive, but that's about 14hp/litre which seems pretty inefficient. Modern diesel cars can usually get >60hp/litre.
i think the engine is optimised for torque not raw power. BUT... 1950hp..? There are cars with more power! How is it enough to pull 1000 ton trains at any speed? Any engineers here?
It's torque. If you see a freight train starting up it is excruciatingly slow to get going. Also, rolling stock has a lot less friction than trailers/cars with tires; so once up to speed, a lot less hp per pound is required to maintain that speed compared to something like a semi trailer.
The only production cars reaching anything like that power level are electric super cars. As to how it works: rolling resistance. A typical coefficient of rolling resistance for a railcar is somewhere around 0.0015. Let's guess that a typical train is somewhere around 5000 tons so you only need to be able to exert 8 tons of pulling force to accelerate that train.
Such big engines runs at low RPM, below 1000 (I have not looked at this particular model). It's common for boats to run at 500.
In comparison, my 2.2 liters 2007 diesel mercedes runs at around 2400 RPM at cruising speed of 65mph, which is its max torque. Max HP (150) is achieved at 3500 RPM. It's by no mean a sporty car but it's low RPM torque allows to pull the horse van easily.
The freight carrier boats can feature impressive diesel engines, of thousands of liters, producing millions of Nm of torque, hundred of thousands of HP, at ~100RPM.
so the goal here is to minimise revolutions per minute. Is this to increase stability or efficiency? Or is it just so the engine won't shake itself to pieces?
The engine is probably designed for fixed RPM, because that way it can be tuned specifically to that RPM. High RPM (past a certain reasonable level) makes all the mechanical engineering harder, so you'd choose a level that's high enough for the power you need, but no higher. There's a tradeoff because to increase power you can either increase the RPM or increase the physical size of the engine, so you do whichever is easier based on the constraints of how it's being used.
It’s always a trade off of many dimensions. Usually, if you are looking at resistance (pulling weight, navigating water, ...) more than speed, a bigger and slower engine provides the torque you want at low engineering costs, more resilience, less cooling constraints ...
For some cultural reasons, American muscle cars featured big relatively slow but torquey engines compared to their Italian counterparts.
The video at the end of this page, and the discussion before it, show how little force is required to keep a train moving. A very strong man can move a 70-ton locomotive:
There are cars with more power, but that engine can deliver 1950hp all day without stopping. Try to pull that much power out of a car and it will overheat / self-destruct in a few minutes. Which isn't a problem for a car because at that power output you are at the maximum speed in a few seconds and then back off to more normal output.
The engineers could get 10x more horsepower out of that engine, but the customers don't want that because the engine wouldn't last as long and so it isn't cost effective overall.
Well, they can be 6,000hp or more depending on the model. And 20,000 ft-lbs of torque. The actual torque at the wheels might be much higher or lower because there is not a mechanical transmission, there's a generator and electric motors called traction motors and like most motors they have peak torque at slow speeds. You can probably look up the output of those.
The engines are designed for running at peak power for a long time, which a car engine cannot do. They run at a low rpm and last 30 years; millions and millions of miles. They run on low quality fuel. There's basically no weight constraint, in fact locomotives are required to be really heavy for the sake of wheel friction.
Finally, most power is needed at startup, not for maintaining speed. One locomotive can't actually pull an entire fully loaded train from zero. There is slack between each car, and they are accelerated from zero one by one, from front to rear of the train.
That's displacement, not fuel. It's running at low RPM and likely significantly more fuel-efficient than a car engine. You could make an equally powerful engine with lower displacement (by building it to run at higher RPM), but that would likely be a much less efficient engine; car engines have to do that because they have to be physically small, but that's not such a problem for rail engines.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadNoisy, but effective.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a snow blower was using the jet turbines more for its blow ability than its heat ability.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorniczy_Agregat_Gasniczy
[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/Abgasloe... [1]: (There doesn't seem to be a comparable en site, but images and machine translation work): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerosoll%C3%B6schfahrzeug
Unfortunately you aren't going to load that onto a truck so that would be a straight gas turbine which is great for power to weight, cost and reliability but not efficiency.
It seems like a diesel train or jet engine would be even worse for the environment, per kWh, and even less likely to get federal approval.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2021/02/f82/DOE%2020...
I don't think this is exactly right. I'm sure it wasn't consistent either, but few loads really cared too much.
From the article's link, about a different locomotive doing the same thing:
> Conrail actually had a set of standing instructions on how to provide quasi-commercial power from a locomotive. For an SD40-2, you attach to the bus before the diodes. Operating in notch 6 runs the generator at 647 RPM. Since the AR10 is a 10 pole machine, that gives 64.7 Hz power. You could tweak the governor to get it closer to 60 Hz if you really wanted to, but for powering everything but clocks, it's close enough. I think the method for regulating the voltage was to disconnect the load regulator from it's governor-powered vane motor and dialing the voltage in manually. The output is 3 phase power. Max output in notch 6 is about 1000KW. If the avg home draws 2-3 KW on the avg, that'd power several hundred homes.
http://cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/t/194245.aspx
Most power generating units operate at a relatively fixed rpm for longevity and will ramp a little during heavy load.
Source: https://www.generatorsource.com/Generator_Frequency_Conversi...
Also pulled up an old spec sheet for a Cummins and it had the same rpm/Hz specs.
Link to PDF: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
Edit: added link to spec sheet
The larger the generator, the more likely you have a constant-RPM setup.
Inverter generators can also sell power back to the grid. To pay for the fuel you need more than the typical retail price of electric, so this is only worth it if you have a need for a backup generator anyway. However if you have this need talk to the power company, they often will give you a discount because when there are load issues (See Texas last week), and the ability to add power to the grid in this time will be something they are interested in.
Today most large generators are still constant RPM, but I don't expect that to last.
Also, you can run them in parallel without problems, as long as you keep the governors from oscillating. But proper PID tuning and sensing architecture should turn that into a non-issue.
Larger engines btw. just disable cylinders for part-load operation.
Cylinder disabling has a place too.
A diesel locomotive's engine controls are about producing the right amount of power to match the operator's throttle control. Electrical frequency at the generator (alternator) terminals is irrelevant since that output is being rectified to DC anyways. This is great for a train, because it means you can have full power at any speed - the speed of your train and the speed of your engine are completely decoupled from each other. But if you now connect this normally variable frequency AC output directly to 60 Hz loads, you will need to figure out how to set the throttle to best maintain something close to 60 Hz and your power output will be limited.
One of the reasons old stationary engines (in Europe) in the pre-governator time ran at a fixed speed of 1500 RPMs
There may be minimum quantities in your engine order, though the contract will provide for spare parts which might get you a single replacement many years after the generator is manufactured (if the rest of the engine is still available)
Maybe something got lost in translation and "specific, constant RPM" was describing (a feedback loop of) "watch the frequency and keep it steady" as opposed to "always use this value"?
--
Also, wow. Seriously, wow. A locomotive running flat out could power several hundred homes. Transportation is expensive, both from a relative cost perspective, and also from a resource(-wastefulness) perspective. Electric (specifically grid-connected) trains also suddenly make a bit more sense.
It really isn't. That locomotive running flat out may use a lot of energy. But it's also moving an enormous amount of freight, making the energy used per unit mass fairly small. For instance, CSX estimates it can move about 1 ton of freight 492 miles per gallon of diesel: https://www.csx.com/index.cfm/about-us/the-csx-advantage/fue...
Your trip to the store and back will probably use more energy.
A passenger car should get 20-30 miles (30-50 km) per gallon, so unless your store run is several towns over (or you're in the sticks), probably less energy moving a ton 500 miles by rail. Though yes, personal autos are, relative to size and cargo capacity, profligate energy users.
So in the end it mostly works out.
Some high speed passenger trains do actually do this, FYI.
Which is my entire point.
Started around 20 years ago.
2. If you can't get it up, you won't be going down.
A 110 car unit coal train grosses 143 tons per car for a 15,750 ton gross trainset weight, excluding locos. Metric is nearly the same, I'll round to 15,000 tonne.
Lifting that 1,000 metres (3,300 feet) requires about 150 gigajoules of energy, or the energy equivalent of over 3.5 tonnes of oil. You're not going to recover that fuel going downhill.
(Rough numbers for an approximate answer, but it's a lot of energy.)
The highest elevation mainline crossing in the US was on the Union Pacific Railroad, Tennessee Pass (10,240 feet, 3,121 m), built in 1882 and retired in 1997. Today it's the San Luis & Rio Grande Railroad, La Veta Pass (9,242 feet, 2,816 metres).
https://www.railserve.com/stats_records/highest_steepest_rai...
3.5 tons of fuel for 15 000 tons is 230g of fuel per ton, or around a tenth of a gallon per ton.
So even on the highest climb, assuming none of the energy is used on the downhill, that's 3 tenths of a gallon per fuel per ton for the climb.
For context, a car's engine could move the average car 5.4 miles on flat ground with the energy required for a locomotive to lift the same car up 3km.
As you can see, it's really not that much energy. Which is why regenerative braking isn't used.
Now a freight train will run at, I don't know, 120 km/h? So, theoretically, it could run 2 880 km in a day. As we can see, that's a lot less than the combined 168 000 km 2400 hybrid cars could drive.
So if we're comparing a train pulled by a locomotive like this to single-occupant hybrid electric cars, the train would have to transport 60 people to be about equivalent in efficiency. That seems very doable, you could fit that in a single train car. Also the 1000 kW power output is the peak output, I can't imagine a locomotive would be anywhere near it's max power very often.
Did I goof in my calculations? I may well have! But based on these numbers, trains seem pretty efficient.
Also, looks like your car gets ~230Wh / mile, that’s pretty efficient compared to teslas, what kind of EV do you have? Are teslas just that inefficient or are you including ICE hybrid engine use in that measurement? Model 3 gets ~315 - 350 Wh / mile
On a first glance it would appear so, but it a terrible idea in practice. At least for freight. Commuter trains are often electric (15 Hz? I forget), mostly for local air quality problems.
Train engines are incredibly efficient. Only the largest marine engines are better. These engines are large enough that they approach the thermal efficiency of the thermal plant producing electricity.
So no real gains for CO2 emissions. (Wind and solar don’t count at a first approx. since we’re talking about marginal E use. The train not connected on to the grid frees up production at a thermal plant to lower its production)
But you also loose a lot of resiliency. In extremis, a diesel Trains don’t need anything to run. In case of an ice storm you have to rebuild big infrastructure. Train can help you transport that if they’re independent.
And, as far as I know, all major high speed trains are electric.
All locomotives use electric motors for traction. Diesel locomotives have a motor that turns a generator to produce electricity for the traction motors on the wheels. A diesel locomotive can stop and start just as fast as a fully electric locomotive, but commuter trains are relatively lighter than freight trains. Diesel locomotives can also use regenerative braking.
The Caltrain electrification plan respectfully disagrees. I am not remotely an expert, but I would guess there are two major factors at play. First, a lot of commuter electric trains are multiple units and have no locomotive. This means that more of the wheels can supply traction, which presumably increases the traction-to-weight ratio of the whole train set. Secondly, I think that efficient diesel generators tend to be most efficient at a specific output power, whereas a commuter train runs over a wide range of output powers. A grid-powered electric train set can briefly draw several MW from the grid without a major loss of efficiency.
Commuter trains usually use multiple units, and metro trains always do -- they start and stop often, so the improved acceleration is a benefit.
Long distance trains can be multiple units, or a single locomotive: the time saving is less useful on a train that stops infrequently, so lower capital + maintenance costs win (plus passenger comfort, it's quieter inside).
A pair of TGV power cars, one at each end of the train, has a max power of 12MW at full acceleration, you would need about 14 of these diesel locos for the same output.
The power here is 25kV at 50Hz apart from some commuter lines. Also modern electric trains can use regenerative braking to dump the braking energy back into the grid. It’s pretty common.
14 diesel locomotives sounds like a lot, but that is absolute maximum power, and a TGV carries a ton of people. On routes where they are very inefficient (London-Paris as an example), you're looking at around 10 times more emissions by plane (plane 122kg vs high speed train 11kg.) On routes where they are efficient, you're looking at more around 100x more emissions by plane (65kg Paris to Lyon by plane vs 0.7kg by TGV.)
Data here:
https://ressources.data.sncf.com/explore/dataset/emission-co...
You'll notice that you can cross the whole of France, 1001km Lille-Marseille, for just about 1.6 kilograms CO2 per person per trip. Try that in a plane!
Trains are similar to solar panels... they are operationally super efficient but require a large capital investment. Where they work, they are magic.
Electric infrastructure is even more capital intensive, i would guess that if using was even marginally more efficient, it would have been implemented as railroads benefit from that efficiency. Equipment exists to accept grid power in diesel (Amtrak trains pulling into Penn station in NYC switch).
- flexibility and independence of power source. Switzerland can use hydropower, France can use nuclear power, many places could use coal power and not worry about losing rail transport in an oil shortage.
- reduced maintenance costs (no diesel engines; reduced weight of the trains causes less wear on the track)
- more power, i.e. faster trains, increasing the capacity of the railway line. Passengers approve, and freight trains can accelerate better meaning it's easier to run them between passenger trains.
The US and Canada have less to gain with these than many other countries.
That's exactly what happened in my hometown, which generated power via a locomotive that was literally up on blocks. You could hear it grinding away from quite a distance. They only got connected to the grid when I was in my 20s and long gone.
This part doesn't quite make sense though, because it mixes RPM (per-minute) with Hz (per-second) without scaling.
647 RPM is 10.8 Hz, and more poles should increase the frequency not decrease it - 10 poles means you'd multiply it by 5, so would give you 54 Hz.
Alternating phases would be hooked up to one phase or the other, with negative phase poles connected backwards. I know traction motors are brushed, so probably the generators are as well. If that's the case then you should be able to just bolt new wires on (brushes are consumables, so they are easily replaceable).
edit: managed to misread your conclusion as it would be 110 Hz, lol.
There’s some room for error, but frequency is the a very important metric for the utility to get right. The reason is that motors start to burn when the frequency is significantly off of the design f [1].
So, the blower in your furnace will die (-> no heat in the home). Your laundry machines’ motor burn. You ovens convection oven burns. Etc.
You’re better of with rolling black ours (Texas forgot the “rolling” part) than get the frequency wrong.
[1] think of a motor as an LCR circuit. There’s a natural f, and if youre far from it it will cause heating of the windings
Modern laundry machines have sophisticated power electronics between mains and drum motor.
"Iron horse" is an iconic literary term (currently transitioning into an archaic reference) for a steam locomotive, originating in the early 1800s when horses still powered most machinery, excepting windmills and stationary steam engines. The term was common and popular in both British and North American literary articles.
These days they're basically rolling generators (powering electric motors and using their sheer mass for traction).
Why is it that every article in the world feels like it needs to take a crap on 'big business' these days. Obviously the U.S. could do with a bit of trust busting and regulation that serves the little guy. But the world is different that in was in the 50's and 60's. Corporations compete on a multinational stage, and the big players are absolutely huge. The U.S. can either serve their interests and the U.S. population can reap the rewards of big business existing in the U.S., or we can force big corps to shut down. The latter would place the U.S. in a terrible position for many reasons.
It would be nice to see the U.S. government incentivize heavily small businesses. Perhaps they could do a 'reverse graduation incentive structure' or something where the smaller the businesses the more you get tax breaks (or some other scheme - I can think of several). But we just can't 'shut big business down' and then expect to remain competitive on a world stage.
Good luck with that. We're in the middle of a health crisis that's being used to funnel as much money from small businesses to the biggest ones as possible. Americans' cynicism is well-earned.
Wikipedia mentioned https://web.archive.org/web/20071219233116/http://cnlines.ca... which says there was a third train in the area also.
https://www.haya.qc.ca/storm.htm The following quote is from halfway down the page there’s a first-hand account with some more details than I saw on Wikipedia. Not sure if French sources would have more:
> There was an interesting phenomenon - a locomotive used as a generator. Railway locomotives use a diesel engine to drive an electric generator and this power in many cases is AC. A 2000 horsepower CN locomotive was taken off the tracks in Boucherville and literally driven down the street to the Boucherville town hall. With the locomotive sitting on the street out front the generator is providiing power to the city offices. The locomotive is set to the third notch on the throttle which sets the engine speed such that it will provide 60 hertz power. At this speed it will generate about 500 horsepower or 375 kilowatts of power - enough for several buildings. There is a second locomotive parked on the street near the grade crossing which is held in reserve. It was supposed to be used to power the shelter further down the street but an intervining overpass which would not support the 260,000 pound locomotive ended that idea. Nonetheless this is an interesting way to solve a problem.
> In an interesting discussion on the internet on this subject it was mentioned that on the Devco Railway on Cape Breton Island there are four locomotives specially designed to act as generators in an emergency. Emergency planners may, in the future, wish to look at these locomotives since they could be quite useful in large scale emergencies.
> With a friend I went to Boucherville On January 17 to see this spectacle and met some other friends there. There were folks coming from as far as Sherbrooke to see the sight which is most unusual. It was fun to see folks having their pictures taken in front of the engine. There was a soldier in the cab at all times to make sure no one got too close to the electrical connections or otherwise got themselves in trouble. I doubt that anyone is likely to steal the locomotive!
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In fact, I believe for a lot of engines, the mechanical energy rarely is used directly to power wheels -- it usually (for diesel-electric, for example) is powering a generator that then is feeding electricity to motors + wheels.
So, maybe not such a stretch to take the power/electricity off to other purposes?
The power generation is fundamentally the same as in marine purposes, too. In fact, the modern engines such as the EMD 710 or GE 7FDL, often come in non-mobile stationary/marine operation configurations for these purposes.
The whole point is to use the alternator + electric motors as a CVT basically. You want the engine to be able to use it's maximum power at any given speed. The amount of gears you'd need for a mechanical transmission for the big freight locomotives would be absurd.
Diesel-hydraulic was also tried for a while but was largely unsuccessful. For special applications, like maintenance equipment or moving things in a railyard, you can still find some diesel-mechanical and diesel-hydraulic equipment.
If a freight train stops, depending on its length, it must reverse to add slack between cars. Then it starts by effectively pulling each car one by one. You can hear it as a bang-bang-bang if you're nearby, depending on the coupling method between cars. If a train loses momentum on a hill, it may have to reverse and start from the bottom.
The alternator and transformer don't care about the lower voltage, except that their current capability won't change much (so you loose power capability).
So I'd assume they should be able to use existing power lines from the other side of the overpass to the school, possibly after isolating that segment from the rest of the grid.
This might also connect some other buildings, but typical transformer ratings here (DE, urban, residential; are a few hundred kVA. So
(If you don't know what kVA means, "kW felt by wires/ transformer/generator, but not the diesel" is a rough summary sufficient for this scenario.
(Don't worry, it's neither wrong nor misleading. If you disagree with that statement, elaborate and feel free to downvote.))
The concerted effort to smear Ted Cruz for going on a preplanned vacation before a winter storm (no one could have predicted the fallout, this was effectively a black swan) feels really cheap. It also bothers me to see it shoehorned where it isn't actually relevant. There's a serious media problem in the US.
And that's bad for everyone - regardless of whether you personally agree with the usual slant, the fact that about half the country has lost trust in media because of this transparent, deliberate bias, should concern everyone. It is a failure on the part of news organizations.
https://worthly.com/business/five-biggest-railroad-companies...
Texas has lost power due a snow storm, like Boucherville, but has no CN to ask for help.
The link is set up in paragraph six. I think you can google for details about what is happening in Texas, it might have made the news.
It's especially absurd here, because CN has been privatized since 1995, and the incident happened in 1998.
So each cylinder displaces ~11 liters. I know there's bigger out there, but that's big to me.
is pretty impressive stuff and this one:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachinePorn/comments/mfjdz/this_is_...
Is nothing short of amazing, there are some pictures with engineers going down into the cylinders with stepladders... 1800 liters / cylinder displacement.
CN is not a "Canadian Amtrak" or even an Amtrak competitor. It's a publicly-traded freight rail company that doesn't currently operate passenger service. The US obviously has analogs: Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_National_Railway
Like Amtrak, VIA is a federal government-owned operator of intercity passenger rail services. And just like Amtrak, it operates mostly on tracks owned by private freight railways such as CN.
> Unfortunately, though, the closest thing the U.S. has to a national rail provider like CN is the chronically under-funded Amtrak
> Unfortunately, though, the closest thing the U.S. has to a national rail provider like CN is the chronically under-funded Amtrak
I quoted "Canadian Amtrak" as an expression of my own making, not one from the article.
The article is saying Amtrak, a half baked VIA, is the closest thing they, in Texas, have to CN. That's not saying CN is close to Amtrak.
If my buddy has a Humvee and I say, "Unfortunately, the closest thing I have is a Schwinn", I'm not saying their Humvee is a bicycle.
Quotes are commonly used to mark a specific novel phrase. I was not intending to imply that it was a phrase from the article.
> The article is saying Amtrak, a half baked VIA, is the closest thing they, in Texas, have to CN.
I disagree with the interpretation, and this claim is still wrong.
First of all, the part I quoted makes a statement about the US, not just Texas. I realize that the previous sentence mentions Texas, but this sentence is clearly naming the country as a whole.
Second, if the article is saying that, this claim would also be incorrect. There are actual rail providers that own significant amounts of railway in Texas, and Amtrak (like VIA Rail) is not one of them.
Here's a decent map: https://www.intekfreight-logistics.com/intermodal-network-ma...
> If my buddy has a Humvee and I say, "Unfortunately, the closest thing I have is a Schwinn", I'm not saying their Humvee is a bicycle.
Yes. Unfortunately for the author, the US has multiple Humvee equivalents depending on the region, so saying that the "closest thing I have is a Schwinn" is just false when Union Pacific (among others) exists in Texas and is in the same market as Canadian National.
Yes: Update: Feb. 23, 10:12 a.m. ET: An erroneous reference to CN as a national rail provider has been removed, the railway having been publicly traded since 1995.
One funny thing is the Canadian CN is..CN. It has extensive operations in the US
> Big business, after all, should be expected to put its interests first, no matter the cost to the public, be that a delayed train or weeks-long power outages in the dead of winter.
If CN is a business, kudos to them for contributing to the civic good during a time of crisis, unlike so many American corporations.
Such as the United States Federal Government under the current administration?
Heating is the largest energy expense in most homes, accounting for 35-50 percent of annual energy bills in colder parts of the country.
Home air conditioning accounts for almost 6 percent of all the electricity produced in the U.S.
https://www.c2es.org/content/home-energy-use/
As of Feb. 17, energy was out for 2.7 million households, officials said. With freezing temperatures expected through the weekend, getting the lights back on will be a slow process, as the state has lost 40% of its generating capacity, with natural gas wells and pipelines, along with wind turbines, frozen shut.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-texas-wind-turb...
So extremely quick and dirty: If we moved to passive solar, we could potentially save as much as 10 percent of energy usage and it would be the part that's really critical in a crisis induced by an extreme weather event: The lifesaving ability to stay warm without power.
With climate change making extreme weather events more common, promoting passive solar ought to be a policy around the world. It also helps disrupt that positive feedback loop that we run the AC more because of climate change and running the AC more helps promote climate change.
Everyone loves to pick on air conditioning, but the recent disaster has shown that heating is also a huge problem. As your statistics show, heating can consume more energy than air conditioning depending on the region. AC only needs to lower the indoor temperature by 10-20F, whereas heating requirements can exceed 50F. This makes it a much harder problem to reliably produce the amount of energy needed to keep people from freezing.
Climate change can bring not only hotter summers but also colder winters and more energetic storms. We desperately need methods to generate clean energy even during extreme weather. Especially during extreme weather.
I am not talking about solar power generation. Quite the contrary.
Passive solar is about building design and orientation. One of the techniques it uses is thermal mass.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
Though generally one gets to a point of diminishing returns. It's probably better to get to a certain efficiency point, and then throw some solar/PV panels on the roof and become 'net zero', producing the electricity you need on-site:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_building
Residentially, you can built a 5000 square foot (500 sq. m) home that needs only 1500W (1.5 kW)—basically a hair dyer—to heat/cool:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vul4vMFdkA
Using an HRV/ERV with an air filter per ASHRAE 62.1 and 62.2 gives you very good air quality.
The ideal solution is a ground-source heat pump, where a closed loop is buried underground to take advantage of the very stable and reasonable subsurface ground temperature.
If you can afford to put in a geothermal ground loop and use a heat pump, you can have a very stable heating and cooling solution that is energy efficient and works well in a super-insulated passive home.
I'm not sure you'd be able to float that down in poor weather, however.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RV_Mirai
And had to be converted to running on fossil fuels.
> She had covered 250,000 nautical miles (463,000 km) on 22 kilograms of uranium.
The thing is that Lexington was very unusual for an American ship in having turboelectric propulsion, where the steam turbines were connected to generators which produced power for the electric motors which turned the propellers. Most US Navy steamships- including all of the modern nuclear-powered ones- use a mechanical transmission to connect their steam turbines to the propellers directly. They do run some generators from the turbines for so-called 'hotel load'- operating the ship's electrical systems- but the output of these is relatively limited.
Some other countries' nuclear submarines do have turboelectric propulsion- I think the Russians have used submarines to power isolated Siberian cities in emergencies- and the USN's new Columbia-class SSBNs will. But the amount of electricity you could get from any current US Navy ship would be limited.
The US tried building turboelectric submarines twice, but in both cases they were heavier and slower than equivalents powered by geared turbines. Apparently advances in electric motor/generator technology in recent years have reached the point where it's practical again.
I'm sure this engine has been optimized for different factors, and it's likely a fairly old locomotive, but that's about 14hp/litre which seems pretty inefficient. Modern diesel cars can usually get >60hp/litre.
Such big engines runs at low RPM, below 1000 (I have not looked at this particular model). It's common for boats to run at 500.
In comparison, my 2.2 liters 2007 diesel mercedes runs at around 2400 RPM at cruising speed of 65mph, which is its max torque. Max HP (150) is achieved at 3500 RPM. It's by no mean a sporty car but it's low RPM torque allows to pull the horse van easily.
The freight carrier boats can feature impressive diesel engines, of thousands of liters, producing millions of Nm of torque, hundred of thousands of HP, at ~100RPM.
For some cultural reasons, American muscle cars featured big relatively slow but torquey engines compared to their Italian counterparts.
https://www.nscale.net/forums/showthread.php?26818-Could-an-...
Or a person can start a single rail vehicle moving using a lever under a wheel, by hand:
https://www.aldonco.com/store/p/198-Manual-Car-Mover-with-gu...
Using one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W8c_jMVYAs
The engineers could get 10x more horsepower out of that engine, but the customers don't want that because the engine wouldn't last as long and so it isn't cost effective overall.
The engines are designed for running at peak power for a long time, which a car engine cannot do. They run at a low rpm and last 30 years; millions and millions of miles. They run on low quality fuel. There's basically no weight constraint, in fact locomotives are required to be really heavy for the sake of wheel friction.
Finally, most power is needed at startup, not for maintaining speed. One locomotive can't actually pull an entire fully loaded train from zero. There is slack between each car, and they are accelerated from zero one by one, from front to rear of the train.
When it was actually a smart mayor requisitioning a train locomotive to use it's engines to produce electricity for municipal buildings.