Are they draw-barred to their mother loco? Or just regular coupled? Just wondering what those electrical connectors must look like...
No, they're regular couplers, with the pin puller usually locked, so you don't accidentally uncouple it. And if you look between the locos, there's a whole bunch of cables running between the units.
Isnt Technology Grand !! https://finance.yahoo.com/news/former-spacex-engineers-bring-autonomous-130022992.html
"...is working to create a more efficient, decarbonized freight network that flows on top of existing railway infrastructure." "Decarbonize" the "existing railway infrastructure" and the steel rails turn into iron. We stopped using iron rail 150 years ago--with good reason
A future generation of railfans has so much to look forward to, automated, decarbonized and sanitized.
I'm not sure if CSX still uses them are not, I haven't seen any in a while, but I know they were a few years ago anyway. Not all slugs have cabs. Many of the cabless ones are cut off at the height of the low nose of a geep, so those are really easy to spot . It's funny you mention cabbed ones being used mostly in yard service because I have often seen them called "road slugs" and the cabless ones called "yard slugs", which does make since because visibility would be much better with yard slug. Of course, just like with "road" and "yard" switchers, it doesn't mean they can't be used interchangeably. CSX "road" slug: CSX "yard" slug:
So does the road slug have dynamic brakes? Or does it send it's regenerated power back to the main loco to be dissipated there?
If it has its own motor/generators and dynamic brake system, it would work quite well behind a steamer.
Yes, they were called tender boosters. You can see the drive rod on this IHB 0-8-0's lead tender truck. Some road locomotives had them too to assist in starting heavy trains. They were cut out at a low speed once the train was rolling. A number of roads eventually removed them as being unnecessary and expensive to maintain.
Well, I may be european biased, but there is already a way to drastically reduce carbon emission from trains: string wires and go electric (at least on the mainlines). I know it will never match the very short term economic model of US railroads, but that's an already well proven method; moreover if you power the wires with renewables, like they are doing in Germany, then you can decarbonize seriously without fancy stuff like an hybrid locomotive. I have a Corolla hybrid (the european only 2liter 180hp model, that gets an average of 48mpg - accelerates and runs surprisingly fast when needed), and the most efficiency you can get is when the petrol engine and the battery work together, so the petrol goes to max efficiency regime and load, and the electric either gives the needed boost or charges the battery with the extra power that is not needed. For comparison a comparable Honda hybrid that has a "series" connection (i.e. the prime mover only works as a generator - just like a diesel electric locomotive - are considerably less efficient even if the battery catches the excess energy from the prime mover and gives it back). The way a diesel electric locomotive is built (i do not see the prime mover giving any excess power in normal use) you can therefore just recover the residual dynamic brakes power, which you can very well do much better under wires (back to the initial point) by returning the power back to the grid without the need to pull around an additional locomotive, complete with expensive batteries. That basically unless your route is a continuous up and downhill. The huge advantage of the electric locos is that these are far cheaper to acquire and maintain, and lighter (for the same HP), so the intial capital cost would eventually be recovered in far lower running costs and maintenance.
That would be asking an awful lot from these Yankees. I have seen those and they would not be liked in the USA. Ugly!!
$50 million gone ! How on earth do they expect one car to propel itself from LA to New York ? At least they mention the investment groups spending money on it. The photo shows a regular roller bearing freight bogie with some flat (steel?) plate attached around it. Also is that a cable attached to it possible pulling the car ? It looks way too straight to be a power wire.
Yes, we know. We invented it. The economic model of U.S. railroads, short term or long term, doesn't survive electrification very well. It isn't hard to see why, when you realize that Oklahoma and Texas, just two of the 48 contiguous states, take up nearly as much space as unified Germany.
Actually, the Pennsylvania RR had planned to electrify its mainline all the way to Pittsburgh. They did several studies and all showed that it was economically advantageous. The mainline split at Pittsburgh with one leg going to Chicago while the other went to St. Louis. The traffic on the two branches did not justify the cost of the infrastructure. The electrification went as far as Harrisburg, PA when the Great depression struck. Work was stopped and didn't resume due to WWII and diesels. If the Great Depression had not happened the face of railroading in the US could very well have been a GG1. But electrification comes with a heavy cost for infrastructure. That overhead is expensive to install as well as maintain. You need a lot of traffic to offset that cost. Electrification vs steam was cost efficient due mainly to the manpower needed to service steam locomotives. But when compared to diesels that efficiency was greatly reduced. Adding in the cost of constructing hundreds of miles of overhead and all the supporting infrastructure and the diesels won out. Another thing is that European trains don't go very far. In Europe if you go a hundred miles you could travel through three or four countries. In the US you could still be in the same state. When all was considered, the diesels won out.
Inkaneer, as told at the beginning I got the point, but: The Trans siberian is the longest railway in the world and is fully electrified all the way from Moscow to Vladivostok, you can actually go all the way under wires from Lisbon in Portugal to Vladivostok (10.000 miles give or take). China is not really smaller than the US and there also most of the mainlines are electrified, not to mention the tens of thousand of high speed lines, but these are for passengers only and I do not really see anything over 150MPHs with onboard power generation. In any case I am happy for the US diesels (1/2nd generation), these look wonderful on my layout, and also the GG1. The biggest problem I see on stringing wires on a modular layout is that it is a REAL nightmare.
I watched a video on MILW bridges recently (this one) and was amazed to learn that they were only operating 7 trains per day even after the BN merger, which had conditions related to interchange that made MILW Lines West more viable. So I can believe electric didn't pencil in e.g. 1955 or 1975. But we've abandoned a lot of tracks since then and what's left is funneled onto a few mainlines. Take the route between Seattle and Chicago. In 1978 that traffic was split across three lines. Now the MILW is a bike trail and NP/MRL is mostly local, so all the long haul is on GN/BNSF. The vent system in the Cascade Tunnel is a bottleneck west of Spokane, which forces the lower priority trains onto Stampede Pass. Overhead on this route lets you increase train density, you can mothball Stampede or at least maintain it less. At the Chicago end you have a major commuter corridor out of Aurora that would benefit from EMUs, probably some variant of what runs on the old IC. The problem is financing. Your timeline is slightly off here. PRR only had some of the Philly suburban lines electrified when the market crashed in 1929. NY-Wilmington was completed with private financing by 1933, but everything after that was done with federal assistance and zero-interest loans. Wilmington-DC and PHL-Harrisburg were an early form of "stimulus package" or "infrastructure bill," if you will. Would something similar work today? That would require competence from the feds. And, well... the current Secretary of Transportation is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and the last Secretary of Transportation was the Senate Majority Leader's wife. Not holding my breath.
Oh and then there's this. https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1483102654100385797 In a more meta sense, we have been metaphorically stripping the copper out of the US for the last 50 years. Offshoring manufacturing, radical social stuff... it's the MILW scrapping electrification just before the oil crisis, but on a societal scale. In this context a 50- or 100-year infrastructure investment like wires on the old GN is antithetical to the entire zeitgeist.
