Railroad Forums 

  • Knoxville Locomotive Works KLW20B

  • All about locomotive rebuilders, small locomotive works, and experimental works
All about locomotive rebuilders, small locomotive works, and experimental works

Moderator: Komachi

 #1213669  by MEC407
 
According to Mr. Sean Graham-White at the LocoNotes group, BNSF has been testing the KLW20B demo unit for about a month, and he reports that BNSF crews have been impressed by it thus far.
 #1230650  by MEC407
 
From WBIR.com:
WBIR.com wrote:Knoxville Locomotive Works along with Gov. Haslam said over the next three years the company will invest $6.1 million and create 203 jobs for its new assembly and fabrication plant.
. . .
The expansion will also help the plant make its customers satisfy new EPA emission requirements for trains. The company has patented a new system that makes it cheaper to refurbish older locomotives in order to meet those standards.

The business said it also plans to renovate its current facility by extending the assembly line, installing indoor railroad tracks and new overhead cranes.
Read the rest of the article at: http://www.wbir.com/story/news/local/no ... s/3662455/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
 #1230718  by Allen Hazen
 
Patents are supposed to be for new ideas, not things that would be obvious to "one skilled in the art." But I have no idea how this standard is applied in practice: the wording is vague enough that the standard of novelty is up for grabs...

Anyway, Knoxville's approach to repowering old locomotives is to use a new (smaller, higher rpm) diesel engine(*) but to use the original traction alternator (and so, I guess, pretty much the original high-voltage electrical equipment. (The new engine is comparable to that in "genet" locomotives, though KLW uses a single 2000 hp engine instead of multiple small ones-- the saving is that they don't need a new "gen".) The novel idea is to use a reduction gear to mate the high-rpm engine with the EMD traction alternator. ... Use of reduction gears to match a high-rpm power source to a lower rpm application isn't, in the abstract, a new idea. (Propellors, for efficiency, have to be low-rpm. Steam turbines, for efficiency, have to be high-rpm. Reduction gearing for steamships with turbine engines goes back to the early 20th C.) But the detailed design of the system is probably patentable.

(*) The engine they use is German. The name has changed (the German manufacturer has probably undergone corporate mergers or reorganizations), but I think it is a developed version of the engine used on the K-M diesel hydraulic locomotives built for D&RGW and SP in the 1960s, as well as many more successful d-h locomotives for German railways.

Thanks for posting the news: it sounds as if KLW's product is attracting enough interest from potential purchasers to make KLW and its investors optimistic.

(((Final comment from a GE locomotive fan: pity there aren't more old U-boats in existence! You might want a slightly different gear ratio, but linking an MTU engine to a GTA-11 shouldn't be any harder than linking it to an AR-10.)))
 #1230781  by DutchRailnut
 
The MTU/Detroit 12/4000 is one of most environmentally sound engines in production, to keep tier 4 certification however, it has to be completely replaced every two to three years.
 #1342272  by MEC407
 
The KLW20B has apparently been reworked and renamed the SE24B.

More info: http://goklw.com/se24b" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
 #1429882  by NorthPennLimited
 
There are rumors floating around that SEPTA is in the market to purchase one and use it to replace their SW-9.

Originally, money was budgeted to repower SPAX 52 at KLW in the last fiscal report, but now a crew member has told me SEPTA is in the market to replace 52 with a brand new SE series locomotive.

Can anyone confirm?