I've seen many badly run private enterprises fail too..... and if you think guys who figure taxes can deal with other than financial aspects of running a good whorehouse, you must know more colorful ones than I do.

But, back to the program: if the point is that we're seeing a less than mature technology in development I agree. I'm reading every day about interesting new developments in energy storage technology, be it ways to pile up electrons so they want to run towards where they aren't, phase change, reactions between chemicals, whatever - all of which could get us into a more economic and sustainable way to power many different kinds of things that need to be powered.

We're also living in a world designed for energy intensive distribution systems which we can't give up for good and practical reasons or change overnight.

So, until it's developed to a much higher level to be practical in this reality, if I were to need to buy a new car I'd go hybrid rather than all electric since there's so much in the works yet to be developed and proven reliable and robust. But, I can keep my 18 year old Impreza with battlescars down the right side running reliably for much less than replacing it with any new car. tempering this with personal choices, like choosing then location of my retirement home (recycled from a 1935 build and downsized as well) within easy for old guys walking distance of the Town Center shopping and transit hub in Brentwood, Pittsburgh, PA where, if you are over 65, you get a free annual transit pass. I'll live better cheaper there than in suburban Charlotte, and not have to worry about finding a place to park when going dahntahn. My clunker could be my last car even if we see fast and dramatic change in EV technology for nothing but economic reasons and less need for daily use.

Better life, less cost, more sustainable on a blue collar retiree's income.

Maybe looking outside the box of "powering motor vehicles" could work for people besides me as well?

Overmod knows way more about the technological specifics than I do, I bow to his expertise in these matters (and many others).

So I just stumbled across this on Youtube, about a German trucker using an electric truck, he does it everyday. It's overdubbed in English, that's why the voice is a little weird.

In this one, he's driving an absolutely huge truck with a 738 kWH battery and throws it on some European mountain grades at max tonnage. Note he speaks Euro-tonnes which are 1.1 standard tons, so 42t = 46 standard tons. He also mentions 60-tonne trucking in Scandanavia, where EVs are a done deal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SPWxD35e-Q

He uses DC fast chargers sized 50/150/350 kW for cars. He gets by fine with 350kW and actually wishes for 50kW stations at sleeping spots, which are easy to roll out (a random household 200A service is 38.4 kW). He shows a 50kW station at a loading dock, which is stupidly mis-sized - should be a 350kW with dynamic load management so they take advantage of the factory service rarely being maxed out.

The 738 kWH pack size agrees with my comments earlier of a semi pack being sized like 10 cars. If one was homebrewing an electric semi, you'd use early Model S modules (5.x kWH and 55# each) for 140 modules at 55# each = 7700 pounds + enclosure. Since last writing, cost of those modules from wrecks has dropped from $1000 each to $250 each, so you're talking $35,000 for said pack if you wanted to homebrew.

Here is him driving a lighter truck. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVYIuxktpag

Note the part at 7:27 where he gets stopped by service vehicles blocking his lane on a 2-lane road, and has to get around in an opening between opposing cars. He punches the truck from 0-40 MPH in 4 seconds.

He also runs under trolley wire for awhile in an experimental system, however with the falling prices and improving performance of batteries, that concept is being abandoned.

It's quite a shock to see charging infrastructure so well developed.

"Sierra Northern Railway has acquired the assets of locomotive builder RailPower LLC as part of its efforts to develop hydrogen and other low- or zero-emission motive power." https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews ... railpower/

This, despite problems developing with hydrogen power, mainly the problem of acquiring and transporting the fuel around: https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews ... -problems/

Railpower was originally producing battery-powered units in Canada (Green Goats), then converted to selling diesel-powered gensets, then went bankrupt and its assets were sold to RJ Corman. Sierra Northern is one of the operations that speak highly of gensets, but the Class I carriers are cool on them these days.

Many years back, I posed a question about the utility of these units and received a few responses. They all had a common theme. Multiple prime movers needing to be spooled up made them useless at the step point in power generation and they had reliability issues. One of the more colorful responses described them as the sort of container you might ship back to Cologuard.

It became obvious later that the only reason to have these boutique builds was to meet emissions edicts and take advantage of government grants and subsidies as they had serious operational issues that made the juice not worth the squeeze.

SN probably is stuck with these sorts of boutique builds given the regulatory zeal of CARB and no doubt bought the assets to have an inventory of parts, spares and access to any proprietary technical information they didn't already have.

I'd bet they never market these things to any major road or to any regional/shortline outside of Cali.

The complaints with the gensets reflect what tends to happen with compliance builds. They hork something together to technically meet the mandate, and hang the Mission Accomplished banner and the CEO poses for a photo-op.

What doesn't happen is iterative development, which transforms it from something which "exists" to "actually pretty good".

The concept of redundant arrays of inexpensive diesels is actually a good one and should have better throttle response due to the smaller engine. That's the idea behind twin turbos in cars.

And given the rapid motion in batteries in the last 5 years, it's really time for a revisit. Obviously battery locomotives are going to handle roughly like electric locomotives, and slapping a genset on a battery locomotive makes a lot of sense, since you now have a series hybrid. Not in line haul service obviously unless there is trolley, but workable for branchline and switching.

They 'won't get it' until someone actually figures out how these units have to be used, and optimizes them for those purposes.

The original RailPower figured all they had to do was replicate the old Lackawanna tripower formula: a lotcha gotcha battery cells continually recharged by a little (iirc 220hp) genset. What more would be necessary to shove cars around yards, or in and out of warehouses, right?

Now advance to the age of PSR, with so many hump yards being retired in favor of flat-switching, and notch-5 restrictions everywhere. Why NOT go back to the era of the Essl locomotive -- even if done crudely with gensets on skids instead of real modular design -- and just dial-a-power as your train gets longer or grade gets steeper...

Problem starts with the realization that kicking cars requires more instantaneous horsepower than anything else on the railroad... for about 20 seconds at a time, then it slams into high regen braking. All day long. Meanwhile, even if you share coolant and oil bypass recirculation among your three little gensets, you're not bringing them online except slowly and gently, and when you accelerate them on the governor, pollution restriction is going to make you take 20-30 seconds or more to reach full tilt, and your generator excitation is likewise going to have to be modulated to let the engine 'govern' at constant rpm as load increases. This means in part that if you intend to do practical work with one of these things, you may need to anticipate bringing engines on line carefully, in advance, if you actually want the low-pollutiom beef in that sandwich.

The Joule, NS 999, etc. figure they can get away with this like a BEV: just have a big Tesla-style battery and the equivalent of Ludicrous+ mode, and we'll get around to gheap genset recharge if we have to. Or substitute a Coradia-style hydrogen fuel cell array for the genset engine. Or just arrange for the thing to do plug-in charging whenever the battery gets to 25% charge state or whatever.

Meanwhile, the VCs and IBs in Canada seem to have settled on financinc direct hydrogen locomotives (which have a highly dubious future in current railroading) with pure battery locomotives (which are nearly as dubious as BEV Class 8 trucks in actual service). Don't write home about how much fun THAT mistake is going to be.

Incidentally, you should all read the recent FRA paper on "Cost and Benefit Risk Framework for Modern Railway Electrification Options" (one of the authors is Michael Iden, who has been working on these ideas for many years).

An aside on switching.


On occasion, I will go to Boneshire Brewing on Derry Street, which runs adjacent to Rutherford Yard. It's kind of amazing to see 4000hp units switching and spooling up doing so. If those tracks could only talk.

A nice caucaphony.

Our local shortline has a former UP Genset. The main complaint with it's reliability is not in the engine, but in the control electronics. When it gets wet and damp, it becomes unreliable and glitchy. Add in the automotive/big rig grade sensors and parts, and you have a good case of crud engineering.

When I went from deep sea shipping to inland, I was amazed at how chintzy the engine setups were when it came to controls and electronics. Plastic sensor bodies and loose wires wrapped in that plastic protector wrap all looking like I could pick them up at O'Reilly's. Whereas on the big boy ships, we had nice chunky temperature switches and sensors with proper cables and liquid tight glands. It was like going from an EMD to a Cummins in a Dodge Pickup.

Would you pay the $500K asking price?

Built off an SD-40 truck, with a Cat PM producing about 400HP.

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=122 ... 5475813757

I've seen an image of that somewhere before and was a bit amused. For $500k, I'm really amused.

When I first heard of those TP units, thought that's an interesting idea for a limited purpose, as it reused reliable EMD trucks and I think TM's and has a single prime mover-which if it can withstand rail use/abuse avoids the problems with the multiple PM gen sets.

Of course a lot of these boutique rebuilds were no doubt designed and built thinking the buyers would be paying with DERA or other grants. If that's the case, the contract price becomes less of an issue.

That sort of thing is precisely what DOGE was intended to address.

In a less-imperfect world, they'd go about it by understanding the technological requirements of a 'replacement' locomotive, not just the political or expedient, and while they're at it, make payment of some grant money as 'draws' rather than the approach that so hobbled the 1361 and 1309 restorations (to name two).

Of course, that presupposes the granting 'agency' will have the personnel, with bot the training and the interest, to look analytically at potential solutions to the actual problem, not just the spin in the proposal. And those are likely to be thin on the ground in the brave new world, unless very specific efforts are made to build an appropriate cadre that doesn't follow the usual civil-service path of 'where you stand is where you sit'.

Critters on full-size locomotive trucks are an interesting thing to consider. Presumably the power 'module' would be fabricated as a skid, with as much integrated, encapsulated, potted equipment as possible, and Parylene everywhere epoxy is infeasible. I would go so far as to modularize within the skid, so that an engine could be removed for service with minimal jack or crane capacity.

A great source of fun is how many TMs you use in a 1500 to 2200hp truck when your motor peak output (probably never reached or perhaps even approached in service if you have Tier 4 or 5 as it gets installed on 'affordable' truck engines). You can't conjugate the axles with anything sensible, but I'll bet a hat many of these people will take all but the center TM out and run on the middle of the axle... watch it slide at the drop of a hat, and heaven help anyone who wants to use dynamic or blended braking in operation. Keep 3 TMs (in permanent parallel with field weakening, or AC induction) and your weight and cost go up, but you get on that rectangular hyperbola pretty quick. (I ASSume nobody is ever going to run one of these things up to where the motor might be in danger of armature swell!) This would be a perfect place to use those little 220hp geared motors as seen on the old NYC MU electrics (you have to know were to look under the truck to realize there's actually a motor there)... but those will cost more than a 'legacy' traction motor in more common use that is costed-down, and will involve different, and probably expensive and proprietary, parts and methods to maintain.

The situation using a HTCR truck instead of a Flexicoil or roller-blade is interesting. A conclusion by EMD fairly early was that actual lever or hydraulic 'steering' of the radial axle movements wasn't necessary, and that simple gravitational and flange forces developed all the steering accommodation needed. I think that applies to a two-truck locomotive with pin-guided trucks, but it might not to the equivalent of an 0-6-0 with Klien-Lindner or radiating axles. And a solution might not work on lousy low-Class or excepted track, with dubiously high peak cross-level defects.

Since we're talking locomotive trucks....

If anybody would know this, I suspect you might it.

It seems that a couple decades ago, the 4 axle road engines, i.e. GP-40's and the last GE 4 axles went the way of the dodo bird and were dismissed in favor of six-axles.

I assume that somewhere along the line somebody decided it was better to have 3 six axles on the head end than 4 4 axles.

Along the line, the trucks seemed to become more complicated and more focused on having features that allowed better tracking and less curve wear.

Why didn't somebody create a BB BB with two two axle trucks at each end like EMD did with Progress/EMD did with this meter guage unit for export?

https://www.progressrail.com/en/Segment ... Ce-BB.html

I'm going to guess that the design is to allow a large, high horsepower loco to run on tight, narrow gauge curves. I'd also assume that the arrangement would allow for a bit of lateral movement of at least one truck in each set which would complicate things a bit for servicing.

C-C freight locos drew favor for of their lugging capability and the desire to run longer trains hence the continued developement of the trucks to reduce wear and tear and for better tracking. Seems to me that B-B locos did hang on for a while in some high-speed services - think Santa Fe's Q service intermodals. Could be mis-remembering, though.

The reason I was given for the 'switch' to six axles was a combination of weight and parts commonalty. Added weight for better cooling and heavy S.580 cabs made locomotives better than GP60s "too much" for four-axle trucks to run reliably.

It would have been possible to go to a BoCo/2000-2400hp C-Liner sort of solution, either with a C or A-1-A truck... but that would mean supporting two complete truck designs and sets of parts instead of one.

That the number of traction motors was not a determining factor, especially after AC drive became such a 'thing', can be seen in the adoption of the six-to-four-motor conversions, including the GEs with those unloading center idler axles.

IN THEORY you might be able to build a B-B "high-speed" locomotive with a Tier 4 or 5-compliant high-speed prime mover like a C175 or QSK Cummins... but I haven't seen any serious propositions for non-specialized freight locomotives, and I suspect the current PSR-addled desire for notch-5 restrictions and the like means that there won't be any great desire for new builds any time soon. It'll be interesting to see if there is a dual-mode-lite hybrid proposal from RPS or whoever that combines a couple of four-axle units with a battery-electric also on 4 axles, like a smaller version of the anticipated two- and three-unit hybrid consists.