Planes More Fuel Efficient then trains for passengers

http://www.geocities.com/dtmcbride/trav ... e-car.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_effic ... sportation
For a Plane carrying 200 passengers long distance (Buffalo-St. Louis) once the plane is in the air it does not have to deal in grade changes. Also equipment weight is less per passenger then it is on a train. Another factor is crew hours. Airline crews make more miles then Railroad Crews as they do as many as 5 legs a day covering a couple thousand miles.
Now dont get me wrong here--I am talking deisal powered trains here and believe that regional rail for trips of 2.5 hours is still the best choice.

well, from a fuel perspective, the fewer the stops the better. the main thing that jumps out is the passengers "per vehicle." without a doubt, slow, unreliable trains carry fewer passengers and burn more fuel than faster, reliable trains

There is, of course, no question that if you want to haul 200 people from Buffalo to St Louis for the least possible fuel consumption you'll stay on the ground-- maybe on buses, maybe on some rail vehicle. It's another question whether Amtrak burns less fuel per passenger-mile than the airlines on a given city-pair.

Excuse me?

From the very article:

Rail (Commuter) 31.3 2,996 BTU/mi 6.1 L/100 km (38 MPGeUS)
Rail (Transit Light & Heavy) 22.5 2,784 BTU/mi 5.7 L/100 km (41 MPGeUS)
Rail (Intercity Amtrak) 20.5 2,650 BTU/mi 5.4 L/100 km (43 MPGeUS)
Air 96.2 3,261 BTU/mi 6.7 L/100 km (35 MPGeUS)

From what I see, a lower BTU usage per passenger is more efficient, and any rail does better than any air.

The main question is going to be (already is in Europe) the amount of carbon emitted by different modes. There is talk of fuelling aircraft with bio fuels but I doubt if that would be possible except for a very small number of planes. Rail, once it is electrified, can run on whatever non-carbon energy feeds the power lines, and may well be able to run on hydrogen in the future for non-electrified lines.

I think one can draw from this that theres not a huge difference in overall fuel consumption .

Compare a air shuttle to Acela New York - Washington and i think youll see a big difference in rails favour .

Compare New York -Los angeles , and i would expect a big difference in the airlines favour .

horses for courses .

Littleredcaboose wrote:http://www.geocities.com/dtmcbride/trav ... e-car.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_effic ... sportation
For a Plane carrying 200 passengers long distance (Buffalo-St. Louis) once the plane is in the air it does not have to deal in grade changes. Also equipment weight is less per passenger then it is on a train. Another factor is crew hours. Airline crews make more miles then Railroad Crews as they do as many as 5 legs a day covering a couple thousand miles.
Now dont get me wrong here--I am talking deisal powered trains here and believe that regional rail for trips of 2.5 hours is still the best choice.

I believe this is very flawed, most trains can carry way more than just 200 passengers and Buffalo-St. Louis is not exactly
what would be considered much of a market for either air or rail.
Trains also can serve many passengers between the end points and sometimes there are not too many passengers between
the end points but a lot of passengers use a partiular train.
For trips of around 500 miles or so, rail is an excellent choice especially where there is already established corridor type
train service.
Noel Weaver

David Benton wrote:Compare New York -Los angeles , and i would expect a big difference in the airlines favour.

No reason to expect that, if you're comparing a full airplane with a full train.

timz wrote:

David Benton wrote:Compare New York -Los angeles , and i would expect a big difference in the airlines favour.

No reason to expect that, if you're comparing a full airplane with a full train.

once the plane gains altitude , it is very fuel efficent . its the takeoff and landings that use alot of fuel .
the train also has to supply 4 days worth of aircon and hep for the journey . but maybe the difference isnt that big .
i was trying to point out that the overall fiqures cover a multitude of differnet journeys .

Littleredcaboose wrote:http://www.geocities.com/dtmcbride/trav ... e-car.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_effic ... sportation
For a Plane carrying 200 passengers long distance (Buffalo-St. Louis) once the plane is in the air it does not have to deal in grade changes. Also equipment weight is less per passenger then it is on a train. Another factor is crew hours. Airline crews make more miles then Railroad Crews as they do as many as 5 legs a day covering a couple thousand miles.
Now dont get me wrong here--I am talking deisal powered trains here and believe that regional rail for trips of 2.5 hours is still the best choice.

Who is Donald McBride...and why should I care?

What are this gentlemnan's creditials as an expert in this area?

I think you need to reexamine your sources.

David Benton wrote:once the plane gains altitude , it is very fuel efficent .

Compared to what?

What mileage does an A320 get in the cruise-- maybe 0.7 statute miles per gallon? It will vary with altitude and weight, of course, but is that a fair guess at the average?

How hard will it be for the train to beat that seat-mileage per gallon, even if it has sleepers and a diner?

I found the paper The Energetic Performance of Vehicles which is a well written and peer reviewed paper published in a reputable journal, to be very informative. Its conclusion appears to be that there are some trains that are less efficient than some planes, but properly designed high-speed trains beat planes by a huge margin.

In general the caveat from the Wikipedia article which says:

There is a distinction between vehicle MPGe and passenger MPGe. Most of these entries cite passenger MPGe even if not explicitly stated. It is important not to compare energy figures that relate to unsimilar journeys. An airline jet cannot be used for an urban commute so when comparing aircraft with cars the car figures must take this into account.

is important to keep in mind. The paper cited above tries to alleviate some of these problems by addressing as many of the confounding effects as possible by careful analysis, but still acknowledges this problem.

Other confounding factors are things like whether the car or train has regenerative brakes or not, which can only be taken into account by using different categories for those that do vs. those that don't. Hence the paper lists cars like the Prius which has regenerative brakes, as a category unto itself.

Fascinating subject...... but overall the answer to almost any question would appear to be "It depends" unfortunately.

David Benton wrote:

timz wrote:

David Benton wrote:Compare New York -Los angeles , and i would expect a big difference in the airlines favour.

No reason to expect that, if you're comparing a full airplane with a full train.

once the plane gains altitude , it is very fuel efficent . its the takeoff and landings that use alot of fuel .
the train also has to supply 4 days worth of aircon and hep for the journey . but maybe the difference isnt that big .
i was trying to point out that the overall fiqures cover a multitude of differnet journeys .

Indeed!

A dirigible trundling along a 20mph should be even more efficient No energy needed to lift and very little energy needed to overcome air resistance

The McBride link doesn't appear to have even been submitted to spell-check ("polution"), so I doubt the work's conclusions would hold up if given any sort of peer review. The problem with cross-modal comparisons is that while air and rail fuel consumption numbers can be fairly accurately determined by analyzing information published by the airlines and Amtrak, the fuel consumption comparisons for auto drivers are less reliable. I tend to roll my eyes when I see studies that assume that the average auto carries 2.6 passengers and gets 26 mpg and then use that standard to compare an auto's fuel efficiency against the numbers provided by Amtrak or the airlines.

Geocities closed months ago and was hardly a relevent source when it was open. It does however serve to make wikipedia look like a peer reviewed source which it of course is not.