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Jet Turbine Locomotives
An anonymous submitter writes "I saw this article in the paper today. Not only is it lighter than a comparable diesel engine, it should burn the fuel more completely and be a bit better for the environment. Not to mention it is much faster. They should make more of a point that the North American railway system needs a major overhaul in order to support faster trains." The Department of Transportation has some information about next-generation trains, including a design incorporating a flywheel to improve acceleration.
This reminds me of the urban legend where a guy attaches a JATO to his Impala and plants himself into the face of a cliff. Apparently the story had truthful elements, the real guy behind it did attach the JATO to an old push railroad car and it worked fairly well. So I can imagine something like that could be commercially viable with a little more advanced developement.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
If you were willing to foot the extra bill for one of these in new trains that you bought (assuming that you buy trains) it would have more advantages than just efficiency and speed--can you imagine how cool this would look in an advertisement?
I hate flying. The cramped seats. The claustrophobia. The ridiculous rules about standing and walking around...
I'd much rather travel by train, but it's always been much too slow. Even though these new trains are still slower than flying, they make up the difference quite a bit.
A smooth, relaxing train ride where all seats are Business class or better? Sign me up.
there was talk about these new bombardier trains being used to replace the current VIA rail trains that go between montreal and torronto.. i happen to live rather close to the tracks and i dunno if i want to hear a train flying down the tracks at 240kph at 11pm like the current VIA trains do.. :o/
MABASPLOOM!
I guess they could be clearer, but I doubt this locomotive uses the jet engine for propulsion, rather it uses the jet engine to generate electricity that drives the same gigantic electric motor that moves the train today. Although the engine is a much higher-tech device to maintain than a diesel engine, it should be cleaner and possibly quieter as well.
You can go faster because a turbine engine that generates the same kilowatts as a conventional diesel does will be lighter. Less weight can equal more speed.
All that said, I'm not sure that "less weight" is a priority for most locomotives. If I remember correctly, the enormous weight of the locomotives is critical in pulling literally miles of loaded box cars up an incline. Of course, passenger trains are packed with very low density compared to freight, so maybe that's what this is for.
It's not that new an idea. British Rail's experimental APT-E train was gas turbine powered, back in 1972. However the line they were intended to be used on was electrified, and so this part of the project was abandoned.
"God is a being of terrific character...cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust." Thomas Jefferson
Because of Japanese expertise in this area, other countries (other asian states, some european) either licence the technology outright or tap the experts to develop their own technology AFAIK France has not licensed any ShinKanSen technology nor hired any Japanese expert to develop the TGV, which also goes much faster than its Japanese counterpart. Actually it's the French tehcnology that Bombardier licenses to build the Amtrak's Acela. The Germans have developped their own bullet train also, and are currently looking into maglev. The Italians also have their own, the Pendolino, which is based on active tilting for being able to take tight curves instead of building new routes.
Yes, the old gas turbines. Fast and fuel-efficient at high speed, but it's a fact of life in railroading that locomotives spend most of their lives idling in one yard or another. UP found that they sucked fuel almost as fast idling as at full throttle. "The turbines burned about 90% of max HP fuel at idle so they would shut the turbine down going down longer hill. BIG THING, is you never stopped turning the turbine hot because the shaft was so long/heavy that it would sag when hot and you would never get it turning again. If you did it would be somewhat out of balance and shake the heck out of things." -- http://www.northeast.railfan.net/turbine_faq.html
Cool engines though, and other than the fuel consumption at idle, they were successful experiments.
I have seen several Freight Trains powered by gas turbines.
t m
http://www.railpower.com/2support/locomotives.h
Less weight is a bad thing, by the way. Stopping on a dime is not something railroads are interested in -- basically if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, it's your fault (or they screwed up, but that is usualy because of screwups between rail companies). In any case, the locomotives need to be a certain weight to pass FRA regulations -- a light locomotive would need to be weighed down anyhow with the requisite safety equipment -- check out the Acela Express. It could have been tons lighter than it is, but FRA regs made it one of the heaviest high speed trains ever.
I looked into train travel a couple months, Florida to St Louis and it was more expensive than airfair.
The trip would've taken longer than a bus too.
So, no cheaper than airplanes and it takes longer than a bus... any wonder hardly anyone travels via trains anymore?
We want fast or cheap. Trains are neither right now.
I had read about early attempts to use this technology to power trains, but I seem to recall some heat dissapation problems. I believe it was when these locamotives were stationary beneth things like overpasses and tunnels that they had problems with the output from the jets burning/melting things. My guess would be that they solve this using some of the same technologies they use to reduce the heat signature of aircraft.
The other difference between noise from a plane and noise from a train is the noise footprint on the ground. With planes the noise footprint on the ground is much larger because the plane is in the air so more people further away from the plane can hear it and be affected. The train being on the ground has its noise dampened by buildings, trees, etc. so this limits the noise footprint.
Something I've never understood about plans for building high-speed rail networks: if you're gonna go and build on, then you're allready willing to spend a huge amount of money. Why not spend a bit more and get a system that works; i.e. go to the SNCF office in Paris, throw money at them and say "we'd like to borrow the entire TGV developing team for a few years" and then set them to work. SNCF introduced a whole new high-speed line (the TGV Mediteraniee) about a year and a half ago and it was running right on schedule within a few weeks after launch (or as much of a schedule as the French railway has). Acela's been going for how long without fully working?
If you want a practical high-speed rail network, go get the French or the Japanese and be prepared to spend a huge amount of money, both on initial capital and maintenance. SNCF has like six TGV trains who just drive the rails constantly looking for cracks and fissuers - as a result, every inch of track on the network is rechecked every two months, if my memory severs me correctly.
Cue The Sun...
If you look at the weight of a fully loaded train and the weight of an unloaded one you will see they are very close. A light weight train car will weight in at 50,000 lbs and can carry less than 3 times that. When the average loads these carry are a few pallets and is typicaly less than 10% of the weight of the car. The result is a huge mass that gets moved and that takes energy.
The reason train cars weigh so much is so they don't come off the track when they are pulled around corners. Even with the large radius curves on trainlines, the side forces of a mile long train with a fully loaded car at the back will be quite high. The early solution to that problem was to make the train cars weigh more and the result is now all trains cars fit into a standard weight. This also makes passenger trains weigh far more than they should. The US rail industry could save a major part of its energy bill by introducing a lighter train standard but that would cost a fortune in new rolling stock.
At around 200mph, easily achievable using current train systems if you got high speed rail all the way, you should be able to go from downtown San Francisco or LA to New York in 15 hours. That is actually not that different from air travel if you take into account all the overhead associated with air travel (security, parking, transportation to/from airport, etc.), and it's a whole lot more pleasant. With improved technology, perhaps one could even get that down by a few more hours. And trains don't fly into buildings either.
A similar article in the San Francisco Chronicle brings light as to why this came out now. A 25 billion dollar project to link San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento by high speed rail is close to becoming a reality. Expect lots of cool new train tech to come out in the next few weeks as train powers that be duke it out for this sizable contract.
Yeah, Amercia big and scarcely populated is always the argument for having shitty train, shitty cellphone, shitty powergrid, basically shitty everything that needs a massive and coherent investment in a networked infrastructure. Wouldn't it rather be the over-decentralization and lack of public funding for anything that is not a weapon that is to blame ? A high speed train from San Diego to Seattle would be profitable within a decade and instantaneously take half the market from airlines (not for going all the way from San Diego to Seattle, but from LA to SF, from SF to Seattle, etc). Scarce population in the rest of the country or not.
I had the chance to cruise on the Millennium last year, which has two gas turbine engines hooked to electrical generators which both supply energy to the ship's power grid and also power the motors driving the propellers. I'm sure kilotonnes of ship will help silence the engines, so I can't speak to noise, but they were amazingly vibration-free, unlike more common deisel engines with a direct physical linkage from engine to drivetrain to prop.
I'm not sure how that translates to train use, but I'm curious to find out. Considering that they'd probably provide electricity to power the wheels, I wonder if a sufficiently sized flywheel arrangement or battery bank could mean that the engine could operate at constant speed, preventing the frequent idleup and idledown which creates a much more distracting noise at a distance than the noise of a constant engine...
Kevin Fox
That's true, however, note that I said that when talking about people moving, trains were dead. the military, for example, loves trains because it moves all their tanks that way.
However, in cargo moving speed is not necessary. Aircraft handle the high speed, low volume traffice quite well.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Fascinating - Bombardier has unearthed the Turbo Train. Back in the late 60's - early 70's United Aircraft built and maintained a number of Pratt and Whitney turbine powered train sets. These operated between Boston and New York - Where you could connect with the high speed Metroliner Electric MU cars running New York to Washington.
They were kind of cool. The trainset was semi-permanently arranged with 1 wheelseet between cars. They employed the same tilt-technology pioneered by Talgo years before in Europe (and still used today) that allowed their operation at higher speeds through curves superelevated for lower speeds. If you were riding in one of the dome seating areas in the propulsion unit you had a good view. If you were riding at night and had a smart conductor that knew enough to turn off the station stop lighting in the dome you had a spectacular view ahead - if you had one that was lazy and left the lights on you couldn't see out and the lighting was too bright to sleep.
BTW - Regular riders knew the seat pads unsnapped (a design for easy maintenance/cleaning) and could be repositioned for greater comfort during the long trip.
Ah, technology - the more it changes the more it stays the same.
I'll have grounds
More relative than this: the play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.
Hamlet. Act ii. Scene 2
We also have a Congress who feels that Amtrak should be paying its own way, and not requiring federal subsidies.
Meanwhile, just how big is the tax infrastructure that's already in place supporting our road and highway system? Road traffic is really *heavily* subsidized by our taxes, and not just the ones at the pump, tires, and vehicle registration.
I've also heard that there's a heavy federal infrastructure involved in air transport, though I know nothing of the breakdown there between private and public sector. I remember Reagan ordering the air traffic controllers back to work, suggesting public sector, there. (I don't remember Taft Hartley being invoked, though it may have.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Currently: Diesel > Generator > Electric Motors > Wheels
Turbine A: Turbine > Generator > Electric Motors > Wheels
Turbine B: Turbine > Gears > Wheels
Is Turbine B possible? How do the losses of a generator & electric motors compare to a gear system?
Elijah Chancey www.elijahsadventure.com nomadic IT consultant, bicycling across america "all that you touch / and all
I hate to say it, but the barrier to high-speed rail isn't the locomotives. It's the track. A current GE P42 locomotive, one of the main workhorses of the Amtrak fleet, has 4200HP (hence the name) and an as-configured top speed of 106 mph. There is no track in the US where it can safely go that fast (the Acela service can run faster on the northeast corridor, but it's a quite different train set entirely). The GE AC6000 has 6250 HP (so why isn't it called the AC6250?) and something on the order of 27000 (twenty seven thousand) foot pounds of torque redlined at 1200 rpm. If you need more power, just MU ("multi-unit") as many as 4 of them.
Just look in Japan, France, Germany or Spain, all countries with HST lines. IIRC all these countries except Germany use the just for highspeed passenger trains. The German ones are also use for freight at night. The costs of building such a line go into the billions of Dollars. Most of it atleast in Europe is payed by the governments. So if you want lines in crowded areas in the US (North East, Southern CA) you'll need to find ppl who are willing to invest billions of Dollars into a project and given the current status of US rail traffic I doubt many would be interested. The new Cologne - Frankfurt HSL took 6 years to build, is 110 miles long and the train reaches a speed of 205 mph.
As for power, the best place is to go to Switzerland and see the class 460 SBB engines go up the Gotthard. For major freight trains the SBB puts two class 460 electrical engines with a topspeed of 230 km/h and a maximum power output of 6.1 MW (± 8300 hp). And a maximum tractive effort of 300kN.
The original article points to the value of this new train as being partly that current tracks need not be electrified.
Surely the point is that existng tracks cannot handle anything other than the painfully slow vehicles of yester year - take a look at Acela, that barely manages an average of 60MPH for all its hype.
The sad truth is that existing tracks and trains have a lot of derailments; unless the track is replaced there will only be more of the same.
Sorry, but the idea of being in a train pulled by a super fast turbine on ancient tracks is not appealing to me. Does crash, burn seem familiar to anyone?
At one meter, how loud in dB would something have to be for a deaf person with their back turned to realize a tone was being generated? And does the frequency matter?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Although this looks promising on paper, one can but wonder if that turbine locomotiveis yet another boondoggle (sp?).
Given that the turbine's fuel appetite does not significantly changes when the turbine goes from idle to warp factor nine (unlike a diesel), one wonder what fuel economy will be with a SINGLE 5000 hp turbine engine. Okay, granted, with hotel power (to light-up the cars and air-condition/heat them), you still suck some power from the engine when the train is stopped.
One would think that a sensible way to address this problem would be to use 10 smal 500 HP engines whose number that kick-in would depend of the power needed at a time. But of course, this would mean higher maintenance costs and more chances for something to go wrong. However, modular design could make it easy to replace a turbine.
Even if we end-up with a super-magical turbine locomotive that runs all the time and doesn't suck fuel all the time as well, we'd face a little problem that is caused by the turbines's very suitableness for powering aircraft: low weight.
Of course, low weight means less power needed to go at high speed. But is means also less weight on drivers. Perhaps railroads will be clipping newspapers coupons looking for sand clerance sales (sand can be injected right in front of driving wheels to boost adhesion if the wheels start to slip Wheels will definitely slip if there isn't enough weight on them)...
So, one wonders of the suitableness of a turbine locomotive-hauled passenger train. Will it slip? Will it haul? I'm afraid that a turbine
engine will have to be weighted up... But that weight need not be always deadweight. Big cities call for big commuter train traffic: the thing electrification is for. So, why not add a pantograph and power transformer allowing for full-power operation under catenary when approaching terminals? At least, this will reduce downtown air pollution.
Wouldn't a better way be to have distributed traction throughout the train? You keep power generation in a lightweight power car (it would hardly be a locomotive anymore), and have traction motors throughout the train itself, so to take advantage of the weight there, too. Smaller traction motors, too, or at least, bigger derated ones. The first french TGVs had powered axles under the passenger coaches, and the Hikari Japanese bullet-trains running on the Shinkansen, as well as the newest german ICE trains have distributed powered axles through the trains (and the ICE-3 trains are real neat, too because the front seats of the first cars look on the track ahead, over the engineer's shoulders).
But of course, one hits other problems, such as safely sending traction power throughout the train. You're talking at something like 1000 amps at 600 volts there. Coupling/uncoupling cars would cause problems, and at each car, you also have connections that can go wrong. 100 years ago, in Paris, a subway train caught fire, killing more than 100 people. The cause: high-intensity traction power sent through flexible cables throughout the train. Such lessons from the past are not easily forgotten...
An lighter articulated train would be better in this respect, but then, you end-up with with an unflexible consist.
But, again, adding cars and removing them is expensive, more expensive than hauling around empty seats (or it seems, looking the way some MBAs with adding machines seem to think in railroad adminive departments). But, after all, the french TGVs are articulated, so this is less a problem it might see.
Aha! Let's compromise on, oh, four car articulated, self-contained (1 first class parlour/club-car, 2 second class coaches, bar car & checked luggage/bicycle space with reversible control cab) units, two of which could be powered by one power car. So a 16 car train could be feasible, and you can retain some flexibility.
And then, do we have a tilt-train ? Tilt-trains are attractive, but is still one more thing that can go wrong. And with motorized trucks, you have less room to put the needed power-banking mechanisms...
It should work politically: engineers looove that kind of contraptions! And politicians looove to be associated with forward-thinking technology... But what kind of engineers? Aircraft engineers are clueless about railroad problems (one should remember the woes suffered by the late UAC turbo train), and railroad engineers are justifiably wary of sleek lightweight technology that falls apart at the slightest rail joint...
I am afraid that having efficient turbine power for high-speed passenger trains would end-up in a costlier, less flexible exercise than using electrified off-the-shelf technology in the long run...
actually popular science quoted average air speed @ 100 mph after you factor in security, time spent on the ground, taking off, travling, landing, ect... of course it skyrockets to i think 250 mph when you take a direct flight
moox. for a new generation.
Boil something with it, turn another turbine, generate more elecricity.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Jay Leno recently wrote in the Popular mechanics about his experiences riding a turbine powered motorcycle...