greenearth wrote:I live local and I like trains, but not the smoke. I love watching old steam movies but as an Environmentalist the smoke and Greenhouse gasses they emit bother me greatly. Has Conway Scenic considered the impact their equipment has on our air quality? Can locomotives be switched to utilize Bio-Fuel? What do they do with the by-products of the coal that is burned? I hope they dispose of them in a lawful manner.
As others have said, Conway Scenic's steam locomotive #7470 is used on a fairly infrequent basis due to high operating costs, and thus any impact it might have on the environment is limited. Steam locomotive emissions are visually more impressive than those of diesels or automobiles, but keep in mind that a great deal of what you see is simply water vapor. Watch my video and you'll notice that most of the time 7470's exhaust is pure white in coloration. When the locomotive is being worked hard (increased speed, on a grade, etc), the fireman must provide more coal to meet the demand. This is critical to keep the train moving, so usually the fireman will overcompensate, resulting in wasted fuel and black exhaust (admittedly, this is sometimes done purely for the benefit of photographers). Though I can't provide the numbers to back me up, I recall seeing data from a Chinese study of locomotive emissions which found that while coal-burning steamers release specifically more carbon dioxide than do diesels, they emit less greenhouse gases overall.
Converting a steam locomotive to burn biodiesel is theoretically possible. However, such changes would severely impact the equipment's historical integrity. Fuel conversion is not as simple as throwing a bucket of Crisco into the firebox. I suggest you visit this website:
http://www.martynbane.co.uk/modernsteam ... iesel.html to see an example of what I mean. Perhaps converting the CSRR fleet to emissions-free operation has some ethical and environmental advantages, but it definitely isn't worth the sacrifice of altering an extremely rare historic artifact's core mechanics. There are less than 200 steam locomotives operating in the United States today, and that number is decreasing yearly. Trust me; preserving the past on an occasional Saturday afternoon isn't going to make a dent in the ozone compared to, say, the millions of petroleum-burning cars populating our highways every day.
EDIT: Erm, sorry, that would be carbon
dioxide. Carbon monoxide would be a real problem (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide_poisoning).
