Can’t speak for the motors, but in the midrange setting, the modern Amtrak P42 locomotive’s diesel is running at 900 RPM.
Thank you all for your comments, most interesting thread.
On some trains the sand is delivered manually (see at 0:25).
Found a little clip of a tire being heated by a burning ring of fire:
I see what you did there.
From 20 mph?
Let’s say the track is dead level, and the train is heavy – 100 cars, each 143 tons total. At 20 mph it takes maybe 40000 lb of pull to maintain that speed, so if the train is coasting it’s being slowed by a 40000-lb force, which means it takes roughly 30 seconds to drop to 19 mph, and 30 sec more to drop to 18 mph, and so on. So a mile and a half sounds a reasonable guess.
How about Diesel vs electric? Which would be more efficient in pulling a 100-car freight train? Pluses and minuses for each?
Many of those containers, especially the double stacked ones on top, will be empty containers being sent back to some distribution point where they can be trucked to be refilled again. Piggy-backed along for the ride.
Diesels are ‘electric’. The diesel engines drive generators that supply electricity to electric motors.
There are strictly electric commuter trains of course that pull power from overhead wires.
Glider engines?
There are also hybrid locomotives, that can run on diesel, but which can also raise a contact bar to a catenary if one is available.
Regarding slack in freight trains - in high school I used to caddy - the golf course was near a major Y rail intersection. Trains would regularly stop and start. I often wondered what the people living on the other side of the track would think, since it was 8:00AM on a Saturday or Sunday when we were going down the first hole, and a train would go bang-bang-bang… all the way down the line as it stopped, then a few minutes later bang-bang-bang-bang… in the other direction as it started moving again, presumably when the switch was thrown.
I now live near (well ~100 yards) from a freight line. No crossings near, So few horns. We can barely hear them in the house.
The story is that one engineer will blow the horn when he goes near his house. To say ‘Hi’ to his wife. I find that charming.
I’m kind of the opposite: I don’t live near a freight yard, but there are a couple of crossings within a mile as the guttersnipe flies. Sometimes I hear the train horns, sometimes I don’t.
(Planes rather than trains, but I grew up right under the final approach to McChord Field — now Joint Base Lewis-McChord — and I now live a couple of blocks away from it. And I’m directly under one of the downwind approaches to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. As a result, if I don’t hear an occasional plane I sometimes get a feeling it’s too quiet. So it seems you can get used to prit’ near anything.)
Yeah–we got a (fantastic) air bnb under the Ballard RR bridge. Multi-tracked so a train every 10-20 minutes. Thought it was going to be a nightmare, slept like a baby.
Someone in my old hometown set up a live streaming webcam of the local train track. When I was a kid I loved trains and something my parents did when we were stuck at one of the main at-grade rail crossings in town was to count the cars on the train. A 100 car train was exceptional when I was a kid. But watching the webcam now, 100 is probably below average for what goes by this webcam in both directions - the really long trains have the extra remote controlled engines as discussed above. But much else has changed in 40 years to the local rail infrastructure, most of the old at-grade road crossings are either overpasses now or purposefully dead end at the tracks now. And instead of three different railroad companies controlling the rail lines going through town, now all the tracks are part of Canadian National. And with the overpasses in place around where the camera is setup, train horns are rarely heard on the camera - something that wouldn’t have been the case when I was a kid. Sometime towns have a no train horn ordnance, not sure if my old hometown is now one of those.
Internation freight is shipped in TEU’s: Twenty Foot Equivalent Units. If your container is light, you pay the dimensional charge. If it’s heavy, you pay more. One effect is that people try to mix heavy material with light material. (The heavy stuff needs to be spread out, otherwise you’ll break your wheel load limits).
In Aus, our road limits are the same for short, long, high, and high long containers. That means that a 20’ standard container can ship more weight on the road than at sea, but a 40’ High Cube at maximum sea weight can’t be moved on-road.