Recently, I was in downtown San Antonio with a little time to kill. I wandered over to their new Amtrak station and sitting at the platform was a complete train with two locomotives. Since the train was more than six hours from departure, all of the cars were dark and quiet except for the dining and club cars. I assume those two have refrigerators that need to be powered 24/7. What was puzzling was that both locomotives were running. With six hours until departure, wouldn’t our tax-dollars be better spent turning the engines off while they wait?
I remember a similar incident in Houston. On the TV news there was a report of Union Pacific parking a train in the middle of a residential neighborhood. The residents of the neighborhood knew that living near a train track would be noisy from time to time, but they were upset that the train had been parked for more than a week – with its several locomotives powered. The rumble was driving them crazy.
I’ve got to imagine that railroad locomotives have got to suck the fuel at an alarming rate. Wouldn’t it be more efficient for UP or Amtrak to shut them down when they’re not actually pulling a train? Could I have climbed into the cab of the Amtrak train in SA and driven off with it? While I obviously wouldn’t have been able to dash just anywhere with a train, I certainly could have fouled the rail network for a while!
Hey Guy, I thought about that, but in SA, Amtrak has ground power available. I happen to know this because I took a train that had a layover in San Antonio. My sleeping car was shunted to a siding and plugged into ground utilities while we waited the several hours to be hooked up to our new train.
I think the fridges that I saw were running off a generator actually in that car. Even if they needed some central on-board power, it seems that some sort of auxilliary power unit would be in order. After all, when your jet-plane is parked at the gate, it’s running its APU to keep the lights, etc. going. It saves the big guns for actually shooting you through the air.
Besides, why would freight cars sitting in Houston need power? (There was no mention in the news of refrigerated cars needing power.) I remember this story happened when UP merged with Southern Pacific and they were losing shipments and even complete trains all over the country. Channel 13 in Houston couldn’t even find an employee of UP who even knew there was a train parked in that neighborhood, let alone why it was there.
They keep the engines running so they don’t have to start them (it’s a bitch and it causes wear). Running engines keep the oil circulating and all the internal parts at an even temperature. In an engine that’s just started, the top of the pistons are 200 degrees warmer than the bottom of the pistons. In the winter in Massachusetts, they idle them at an higher speed than in the summer.
What bizerta said with an observation you can make. You don’t have to go to a train station to watch diesels run. Go to a truck stop and watch 'em idle while the drivers take supper.
Was it a cold day in SA? I know truckers keep them in idle on cold days because start up is worse than a bitch.
The diesel engine in a train spins the rotor in an electric generator. The wheels are actually driven by electric motors (powered by the generator), which makes the speed / power a lot easier to control. The diesel engines are, apparently, a beast to “crank up”, and they really don’t use that much fuel while they’re idling, from what I understand. Cost/benefit ratio leans way towards leaving it running.
actually, the biggest problem is the fact that not only are they a bitch to start up… it takes about a day to get the job done…
24 hrs to start up… 24 hrs to turn off. It doesn’t take that much deisel because they are idling and they can charge, because they run off generators like someone said.