Locomotive fuel economy

A much easier solution to the high fuel consumption is to do what SCRRA (Metrolink) does out here in California: shut down the engines and plug them into ground power and air during extended layover time. Also, on quite a few of U.P's newer locomotives (and retrofitted to olders units as well) is a"Smart Start" unit that monitors coolant temp, air pressure, and battery temperture and charge and it shuts down or restarts the engine automaticaly. A great system that works well. The problem with anti-freeze in a locomotive type engine is the rather extensive amounts of fittings, gaskets and seals on an engine such as a EMD 710 or GE 7FDL (Alco 251 too if you insist) anti-freeze will leak out where water will not. I belive the only mediumm speed diesel engine out there designed to handle anti-freeze is the Caterpillar 3600 series engine, but they are only used in a few locomotives that I know of (maybe four total?) and they are prone to crankshaft breakage in locomotive service.

What was the fuel consumption for the last group of Alco C420's, #'s 222-229, like, both idling and out on the road? Same for the MP-15ac's and SW-1001's?

Paul wrote:A much easier solution to the high fuel consumption is to do what SCRRA (Metrolink) does out here in California: shut down the engines and plug them into ground power and air during extended layover time...

That is exactly what the LIRR does.

"NJT's gallon per hour rating is 25 for idling, and 260 while in service."

A 16-645E3 on a freight unit is supposed to burn maybe 3-5 gallons per hour at idle. As I recall 315-RPM idle is toward the high end of that and low idle is the low end. No idea how realistic that is, but...

Run 8 consumption is supposed to be 165-170 gal/hr. Add something for the HEP, but average over a run should of course be less since they're not constantly in Run 8.

That makes sense. Our 38's on the LI which are 645 V-16's burned approximately 95 gallons in a 24hr period. And they were, except for gearing and a few amenities, freight units.

I thought the post about NJT's fuel consumption was kind of high.

I know automobiles, not trains, and on cars with large turbos, they chug gasoline at idle & low speeds, but operate at the peak of efficiency at higher speeds & rpms. In order to compensate for all that extra air at higher throttle aspects, more fuel needs to be dumped into the combustion chamber...therefore running at peak efficiency at closer to WOT, but running pig rich at idle.

getting a bit off topic, but .. no. At low RPM an automobile's turbo is not spinning much and so the engine is essentially running like a normally aspirated engine. If the engine ran "pig rich" it would fail emissions pretty quickly. Luckily, fuel injection computers can easily maintain proper air-to-fuel mixture.

The advantage of a turbo is in allowing a small engine to act like a large engine at high RPM, while getting the economy of a small engine at low RPM.

http://railroad.net/forums/viewtopic.ph ... b7d8ae1038

The information is above for NJT locomotives' fuel economies.