What if: Full systemwide electrification?

[25Hz]

What if PRR had electrified its entire system? What might it look like today? Can you imagine electric trains to st louis, chicago, erie, cleveland, buffalo, detroit, louisville?

Here's a map to help you picture it........

http://webcircle.com/users/cobrandt/prr_65.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

How much of it would remain, how much of it would be freight only, how much of it passenger only?

[Allen Hazen]

Counterfactuals... have to have very carefully specified hypotheses! For instance: when you say "electrified its entire system," do you REALLY mean "entire"? Including all the branches?

Second general point: the smaller the departure from the actual history, the easier it is to make sense of-- and maybe even say something sensible about-- the counterfactual.

So, let's restrict the hypothesis to electrifying the main line from Harrisburg to Chicago and Pittsburgh to St Louis.

Next question. When is this supposed to happen? Electrification in, say, 1958... would have yielded very little increase in operating efficiency (there's a reason why no significant electrifications of American main lines were undertaken in that period!), and the costs would surely have bankrupted the company!

In @ (= the actual world), PRR electrification stopped at Harrisburgh, in 1940. (1938?) Suppose it hadn't. Investment money for major electrification projects (or even government permission for them) would have been unobtainable during WW II, so... what might the PRR have accomplished by pursuing (what at the time they surely intended for the long term!) the Harrisburgh to Pittsburgh electrification project for another year or two (before putting it on hold during the war). I think it isn't totally implausible to think of them extending the wires to Altoona (= electrifying the Middle Division) by the end of 1941: first electrically-hauled Broadway Limited arrives in Altoona on 7 December 1941; PRR hopes for extensive press coverage dashed as non-railroad news dominates the front pages. (Something like this actually happened to the competition: the New YorkCentral introduced a newly streamlined version of the Empire State Express on that day.)

Operationally, Harrisburgh to Altoona electrification would have been unproblematic. The Middle Division has water-level grades, so the same sorts of motive power as on the eastern lines electrified in @ could have been used. (West of Altoona they would have wanted new locomotive designs: the DD-2 was a test unit for new electric locomotive technology.) So: a few more GG-1 would have been built, including, maybe, on the assumption that more freight electrics were needed than there were ex-passenger P5a, a few with 70 mph gearing (in @ the whole fleet was built with 90 mph or 100 mph gearing).

Results? PRR would have been glad of the new electrification during the war. Maybe enough M1 would have been liberated from the Middle Division that a smaller J1 fleet would have sufficed. Long term? With the decline of passenger traffic after the War, it wasn't obvious to PRR management in @ that electrification paid for itself: engineering studies were commissioned, and it was decided that it was, after all, better to maintain existing electrification rather than taking down the wires and buying more diesels. I suspect that a somewhat longer electrified sector would have made this decision a bit more clear-cut, but I doubt it would have made much of a difference in the long run: electric operation wouldn't have been ENOUGH more economical than diesel to improve PRR's position vis-à-vis the competition (and the company would have the additional debt for the Middle Division electrification to pay off).

Another scenario. Diesel fuel got much more expensive in the 1970s: enough more expensive that several North American railroads (mainly in the West) looked seriously into the possibilities of electrifying selected main lines. Harrisburgh to Pittsburgh was one candidate mentioned -- I can't remember detail, but it was at least MENTIONED in a "Railway Age" article -- around the time Penn Central turned into Conrail (actually, I think, a tiny bit later, but still in the early Conrail years). I don't know how much work went into studying the economics of this, and don't know how close it came to realization.

[25Hz]

Yes, the entire system branches, yards & spurs.

[Allen Hazen]

Re:
"Yes, the entire system branches, yards & spurs."

Foreseen outcome: Corporate bankruptcy, probable commitment of senior management to lunatic asylums. Electrification is capital-intensive, only pays for itself on lines with very high traffic density. (Ignoring special cases: tunnels, etc.) In @, the PRR electrified, at guess, under 5% of its total trackage. (Ball-park figure, guesstimated: somewhere between 600 and 700 track miles electrified on a system with 10,000 total route miles.)

To make a scenario out of this that is coherent enough to think profitably about, you'd have to stipulate something bizarre: something to eliminate the cost of electrification fixed plant, perhaps.

---

In the end, U.S. railroads chose dieselization rather than electrification. A diesel-electric locomotive is basically an electric locomotive, but with its own on-board generating plant: this was affordable in a way that stringing overhead over all the tracks wasn't. As a fantasy, we can pretend this didn't happen: maybe elves don't like diesel engines and were wiling to donate overhead wires to make them unnecessary. Then we can ask, what would the all-electric equivalent of PRR's actual diesel fleet have been. ... Probably a bit smaller in over-all numbers, I suppose, given that PRR electric locomotives tended to be more powerful than first generation diesel units. And some new designs: box cabs were inconvenient for switchers (as builders of diesel switchers realized by about 1930), so maybe some sort of end-cab or centre-cab would have replaced the B-1 as a mass-production electric switcher. But it's hard to be sure WHAT would happen in fantasy-land!

((I hope you are not offended by my tone. I like fantasy -- even railroad fantasy -- so if you want to pursue this idea, that's fine: I'd love to see art-work of the GG-2 and the 4-8-8-4 electric that was at least considered for Pittsburgh line electrification. My own, personal, preference in "alternative history" railroad scenarios is for minimal changes to the history of @: scenarios close enough to the real world that reasoned argument about them is possible. As a general, philosophical(*), point, I'd stress what I said at the beginning of my previous reply. We know how to think about "what if"s that aren't too extreme: thinking about them is like thinking about the (near) future, or about places we haven't seen, in @. But a "what if" that requires a huge change from @ -- suspension of the laws of economics, if not the laws of physics! -- is an unanswerable question: there are too many possibilities, if you are going to consider far-fetched possibilities!))

(( (*) Many professional, academic, philosophers have thought and written about how serious reasoning about counterfactual scenarios works. One, the late David Lewis, wrote a short book, "Counterfactuals" that opens with the statement "If kangaroos didn't have tails, they would topple." Lewis was also a railroad fan: he once told me that he had wanted to have, as cover art for one of his books, a painting of the Pacific-type steam locomotive that the Great Western Railway (U.K.) was planning in the mid 1940s, and might have built if Britain's railways hadn't been nationalized for another two years!))

[PARailWiz]

Somewhere out there, a feasibility study for electrifying the Middle Division exists - I've had a brief glance at it from a friend's collection. The thing that struck me about it is that fuel cost for electricity compared to coal (for steam engines) was actually slightly higher around the time of the study (a few years pre WWII if I remember correctly) - most of the cost savings came from the vastly reduced maintenance requirements of electric locomotives versus steam locomotives. Once diesel engines came around, you got most of the savings in maintenance with much less capital expense.

It'd be interesting to figure out how high the cost of diesel fuel has to go before electrification of highly used routes starts becoming economically viable again.

[Allen Hazen]

PARailWiz--
That is REALLY interesting! If your friend lets you look some more at the feasibility study, I'd love to hear more about it!
--
Electric power does have significant fuel costs. For the Middle Division at the time of PRR's main electrification program in the 1930s, fuel for either locomotives or electric generating plants would have been coal. Steam locomotives are VERY inefficient (typically under 10% of the energy content of the fuelgoes into train-pulling), but there are also losses in generation, transmission, etc of electric power: I believe that Chapelon argued, trying to make the case for a new generation of modern steam power for French railways after WW II, that the over-all energy efficiency of electric railways wasn't all that great compared to other forms of motive power. (I wish I could remember my source, and the actual numbers!)

Where the cut-off for diesel price is I don't know, but-- given the number of major railroads involved in studying electrification in the 1970s, oil prices in the late 1970s must have been at or close to it! ... These days... Note that two of the railroads that looked into the options in that period were BN and the CP, and now (2013) CP and BNSF are both looking at the possibility of using natural gas in (at most slightly modified) diesel locomotives instead.

[Statkowski]

Yes, the entire system branches, yards & spurs.

Such an act would have created a wealth of problems totally offsetting any gains made - bridges, tunnels, street running (Clearfield and others), etc. Flatland railroading is one thing, but anything north and west of Altoona or east of Pittsburgh would have required major rebuilding of the right of way just to accommodate any electrification.

[ExCon90]

Still, it would have been neat to see those rubber-tired street switchers they used in Jersey City and Baltimore drawing power from the overhead. Would they have had to have 2 wires like a trackless trolley? Tricky to do with a pantograph.

[Adirondacker]

....Ball-park figure, guesstimated: somewhere between 600 and 700 track miles electrified on a system with 10,000 total route miles.....

They have 360 between New York and Philadephia, another 200+ out to Harrisburg and at least 270 between Philadelphia and DC now. That's over 800 right there. That doesn't account for the three and four track sections between Philadelphia and Harrisburg or the three and four track sections between Phialdelphia and DC. Or the parts between Rahway and South Amboy. In the past there were other lines that were electrified.

[Allen Hazen]

Adirondacker--
I goofed. Badly. The summary of American electrifications in the electric locomotives chapter of the 1940 "Locomotive Cyclopedia" says PRR had 684 electrified route miles and a total of 2189 electrified track miles. Thank you for catching my mistake!

(I stand by my contention that the capital costs of TOTAL electrification make the idea implausible. PRR at that time had about 10,000 route miles total, with a good deal of multiple track in non-electrified territory. My revised guess, then, would be that their huge electrification program strung wires over ... maybe 10% of their track.)

[jgallaway81]

Its an interesting hypothesis, and one that requires the introduction of PPP's about 70 years before they actually came about. I of course am referring to Public/Private Partnerships, coalitions that have lead to the NS Heartland & Crescent Corridors, the Meridian Speedway, the Patriot Corridor in New England, and of course Chicago's CREATE.

Lets assume for a moment that electrification ended where it did before the war. Lets also assume that after the detonation of the nuclear warheads that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American Public hadn't been so terrified of atomic energy. It seems to me that with the RIGHT public relations efforts and lobbying efforts in DC, Pennsy MIGHT have been able to argue that their railnetwor could have served as new truck lines for the US Power Grid infrastructure. If Nuclear Power Plants had been installed with sufficient frequency, HEAVY DUTY power trunks could have been run above the railroad, power substations installed at each station could have allowed the expansion of much electricity to the US much faster and with greater efficiency. Further, overhead transmission line towers could also have added additional other utility trunks: telegraph/telephone, cable TV, today those could be upgraded to fiber optics and mini cell towers.

If the Government had said "We'll install the plants and the towers and cut your property taxes by 45%; you string the wire, pay at cost for the electricity and cover maintenance 50/50", its very possible that electrification, heavy duty electrification could have expanded across the continent. Even if only the heavy transcon truck lines had been electrified, that would save how much diesel fuel? Solar plants in Nevada, wind plants in the plains and coastal regions, nukes elsewhere. Fiber optic trunks which slowly spread across the original ARPAnet to form the internet backbone, could have expanded across the continent like an infectious cybernetic spiderweb.

With wires over the tracks, energized with the appropriate tractive-effort rated electrical power, the only remaining investment would be electric engine technology. Question... could a "B" unit with nothing but transformer equipment and traction motors be put in an A-B-A setup, allowing the B unit to condition the electricity to what was needed by standard diesel electric locomotives? An E8, ABA with pantagraphs on the B unit leading the Broadway Limited as it throttles up out of Altoona Station for the assault on the East Slope of the Allegheny Mountains. No supercharged diesel engine spewing toxic, carcinogenic exhaust products into the air, just the crisp quiet sound of ten thousand horses accelerating the train West. In the meantime, an ABA set of SD-9's holds the tail end of a heavy freight as it drops into Altoona from Gallitzin. Its dynamic fans screaming as ten thousand tons of freight try to pull away and descend the grade at 9.8meters per second per second.

Nope, electrification of the railroad was a bad idea.

[Nasadowsk]

I'm gonna toss this one out:

How would the economics have been if commercial (i.e. 60hz) frequency electrification become practical in the 30's?

Not having to maintain a transmission network, or as large of one, could have been a game changer.

Of course, a government policy of electrification would have helped, too. But that wasn't going to happen (In fact, the US tried to <i>de electrify</I> post war Japan to create a market for EMD's locomotives. The Japanese didn't go for it).

[Nasadowsk]

Lets assume for a moment that electrification ended where it did before the war. Lets also assume that after the detonation of the nuclear warheads that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American Public hadn't been so terrified of atomic energy.

You still would have taken till the late 50's to see nuclear plants. And Shippingport and Dresden were tiny plants. Nobody knew how to build one.

It wasn't until 1960 and GE's BWR/2 at Oyster Creek that nuclear really became economically competitive and for that matter, practical. A lot of the plants prior to that were one-off small size units that had short lives or were technological dead ends.

Back in the 50's, just about every Fortune 500 had an 'atomic' division. It was going to be the next big thing. Big opposition to nukes didn't happen until the mid 70's and really didn't take off until Three Mile Island (OB rail content: Amtrak runs through Middletown, and is electric there). I think the only nuke that was killed in the 60's due to public opposition was Con Ed's Ravenswood (yes, Queens), plant.

[MACTRAXX]

Somewhere out there, a feasibility study for electrifying the Middle Division exists - I've had a brief glance at it from a friend's collection. The thing that struck me about it is that fuel cost for electricity compared to coal (for steam engines) was actually slightly higher around the time of the study (a few years pre WWII if I remember correctly) - most of the cost savings came from the vastly reduced maintenance requirements of electric locomotives versus steam locomotives. Once diesel engines came around, you got most of the savings in maintenance with much less capital expense.

It'd be interesting to figure out how high the cost of diesel fuel has to go before electrification of highly used routes starts becoming economically viable again.

PA RW: Yes-there WAS a study that was compiled for Conrail in the late 1970s to electrify the Middle Division to Pittsburgh and Conway...

The NRHS had a copy of this Study in their Library in Philadelphia - and has been stored since its closure at the end of February 2008...

As we know today Conrail decided to end electrified freight service in the early 1980s after oil became plentiful again after the end
of the 1979 "Energy Crisis"...The Middle Division would have been an interesting operation had it been electrified...

MACTRAXX

[PARailWiz]

PA RW: Yes-there WAS a study that was compiled for Conrail in the late 1970s to electrify the Middle Division to Pittsburgh and Conway...

The NRHS had a copy of this Study in their Library in Philadelphia - and has been stored since its closure at the end of February 2008...

As we know today Conrail decided to end electrified freight service in the early 1980s after oil became plentiful again after the end
of the 1979 "Energy Crisis"...The Middle Division would have been an interesting operation had it been electrified...

MACTRAXX

Interesting - I didn't know about the Conrail study. The one I had seen was prepared for the Pennsylvania Railroad sometime pre-WWII, late 1930s I think. It'd be fun to compare them.