GE delivers 4,500th Evolution Series locomotive

From RTTNews:

RTTNews wrote:GE Transportation, a unit of General Electric Company (GE: News ) announced that its 4,500th Evolution Series Locomotive has entered revenue service in support of GE's rail customers around the globe.

The company said that its $4 billion transportation business marked the important industry milestone at Railway Interchange 2011 held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from Sept. 18-20.
...
GE engaged a nationally recognized independent research laboratory to conduct a head-to-head fuel test between GE's ES44AC and EMD's SD70ACe Tier 2 emissions-compliant locomotives. The research study showed GE's locomotives to be 6 percent more fuel-efficient compared to their EMD counterparts.

Read more at: http://www.rttnews.com/Content/QuickFac ... Id=1715875

Who got the 4,500th. unit? Was it CP?

More fuel efficient than EMD? We heard this all before over 2 years ago. The test in question is EPA -HQ -2003-0190-0907.1 conducted at South West Research Institute for the purposes of testing Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel fuel (ULSD) on production engines.

well isn't GE using 12cyl's vs EMD's 16? If EMD had a 12cyl with same HP then the % might be a little different.

Fewer cylinders, but bigger cylinders.

If my math is correct, the overall displacement of a 16-710 is about 186 liters. A GEVO-12 is 188 liters, so it's actually slightly bigger than a 16-710.

Steve F45 wrote:well isn't GE using 12cyl's vs EMD's 16? If EMD had a 12cyl with same HP then the % might be a little different.

I think that GE dropped the 16 FDL in favor of the 12 cylinder GEVO engine of the same horsepower and approximately the same size is to get better fuel efficiency due to the favorable ratio of cylinder surface area to cylinder volume that you get with a larger cylinder. All diesels lose about 25 percent of the fuel energy through the cylinder head, piston and cylinder walls (hence the large radiators for the waste heat). Taking this to the limit you would wind up with a single cylinder engine of enormous size with all sorts of balance problems and it wouldn't fit in a locomotive. GE also is pushing it in that the piston speed of the GEVO engine is pretty high leading to accelerated wear. GE's marine versions are as far as I know are all rated at 900 rpm instead of 1050 rpm in locomotives.