Lately in the DC market, an ad has been running on the radio promoting freight trains as an efficient means of transportation. They say that a freight train can ship a ton of freight 476 miles on a gallon of gas. Later in the ad they say that freight trains are 3 times more fuel efficient than trucks.
Can a freight car holding 50 tons really get almost 10 miles to the gallon?? If so is that really 3 times the mileage/ton of a semi?
So a f***ing freight train can get half the MPG of my car?!!11one
I need to get a new car.
It’s a national ad; I’ve seen it (for CSX, perhaps?). Pisses me off everytime, because I’m damn sure they’re talking about a diesel electric headed downhill with the engine shut off. 
OK, so since this is GQ, I actually did some research. I found a discussion about it on Amtrak’s boards asking essentially the same question, and someone got a direct response from CSX explaining how they arrived at their figure:
Another quote from the same thread:
Here’s a link to the thread in case you want to read the entire discussion.
If their trains get 476 ton-miles/gallon (which they seem to be able to substantiate), then they’re accusing ( 
) trucks of getting, at most, 159 ton-miles/gallon. Is that believable?
IIRC, trucks weigh about 80,000 pounds (40 tons) fully laden. Let’s err on the generous side and pretend that all of that is cargo; the claim is then that trucks get no better than:
(159 ton-miles/gallon) / (40 tons) = 4.0 miles/gallon
That seems believable, at first blush. Recalling that the actual cargo weight of an 80,000-pound big rig is less than 80k, we see the “three times better” claim would still be true even if trucks could actually do somewhat better than 4 mpg. I dunno, though - what kind of mileage do rigs actually get?
Well, when I was driving semis about 20 years ago, 5 MPG was about what we would expect.
J.
I’m actually surprised that it’s so low. The two biggest energy-eaters in a ground vehicle are usually air resistance and acceleration. Air resistance depends mostly on cross-sectional area, which means that an extremely long vehicle like a train gets a lot of bang for the buck. And freight lines and schedules are usually planned such that the train only needs to accelerate once at the beginning of the run and once at the end, with no traffic lights or the like. The next contributor would probably be rolling friction, but even that, I’d expect to be less for steel wheels on steel track, than for inflated rubber tires on asphalt.
I will add this from a practical standpoint - due to bearing losses (including the propensity of bad/poor bearings) on freight cars, the drag from the freight is more than you might expect.
As a rail nerd, I should be keeping quiet about this, but I have to admit that a lot of freight trains are regarded by their crews as being “high windage”. Although the idea of streamlining a locomotive is a pretty useless one (more to do with 1930s fashion than anything else) and most locos these days are what they call “bricks”, wind resistance is often quite a problem on modern freight trains because they tend to haul containers, and it’s not always possible to keep the empty wagons all at the end of the train, so if they are scattered randomly along the train, there can be quite a few slab ends of containers facing the wind.
Curves also add resistance.
The problem with the freight train MPG claim is that it does not include all the darn support equipment that goes into making a freight train work. A truck owner operates his truck failrly independently, but freight train operations have fleets of support equipment, from little pickups trucks, to heavy cranes, Ford F350’s and everything you can imagine.
How much fuel does the freight train operation use? The heck with the freight train itself. A railroad is an operation, not a certain diesel-electric locomotive. The maintenance of railroads alone is an entire fossil-fuel burning industry.
The real question is: How much fuel does the ABC railroad operation use to move X amount of goods versus the XYZ trucking operation?
But then, what about all of the support equipment and petroleum products (asphalt) needed to maintain the highways, which would receive much less wear and tear if there were no trucks on them?
Personally, I’d rather have one train going from point A to point B, than an additional 280 trucks on the highway between those two cities.
Well, using rail might be more efficient, when all things are tallied, but it can’t be locomotive versus truck. It must be industry vs. industry.
Who knows…maybe rail loses. Maybe rail is effective after a given number of miles, or in certain segments whereas trucks are more efficient for certain distances, cargo, etc.
Presumably the efficiency of rail freight is less when the cars aren’t fully loaded, as a truck would be. Still fully loaded trains hauling freight are quite efficient. Bur for local delivery the truck is king, since we’ve destroyed most of our local rail freight delivery infrastructure.
I think this is the main reason we see so many container trains. It’s an attempt to use the best of both worlds.
I thought this was answered in post #3, second quote box. At least the railroad figure - I don’t know how much overhead there is for trucking. (Do trucks typically run a full load both ways?)
Accidental differences in the way the two industries are organized are going to make this comparison difficult. Freight companies actually own the rails, so CSX can basically calculate the fuel consumption of its entire operation. I don’t think it will be so easy to figure out how much fuel a trucking company would have to buy if it owned the highways.
But even if you could do the calculation, I can’t see how trucking would be expected to come out on top. Simple economies of scale apply here, don’t they? I agree with MC$E; if you had to transport a cargo over a long distance, and you had a choice between one large vehicle and hundreds of smaller ones, which would you expect to be more efficient?
Trains to have to decelerate often when entering populated areas, but they’re not doing stop and go maneuvers that car drivers do. And freight locomotives have been almost exclusively diesel-electric powertrains since the late 'Fifties, which allow the diesel engine to run at its peak efficiency, generating electricity for electric motors that have both high torque and high speed efficiency. It does without saying that hysteresis losses in steel wheels on steel rails are much less than inflated rubber tires on asphalt pavement, and rail track is laid for gentle grade and shallow curves.
Modern train systems actually lubricate the track during curves to reduce wear and noise.
Stranger
How many gas guzzling trucks does CSX have? How many other vehicles do they run? It is great that a loco gets better per ton mileage, but if it takes millions of gallons of fuel on top of what the locomotive uses, then those need to be counted, too.
To decide if rail is better, one component is the fuel efficiency of the locomotives, but there are many other components. Many trains also unload to trucks further complicating the analysis.
Grease guns have been on curves for decades, but there is still a physical resistance in place there, not to mention the curve-on-a-grade scenario, which makes the grade a whole lot worse in real terms.
Absolutely, trucks run a full load both ways. They would very quickly go out of business if they didn’t. A truck running empty down the highway is a big mistake in scheduling.
Train vs truck - the freight rate for a railcar of steel, plus the cost to unload and bring it to my yard, is less than the freight cost for 4 trucks (which is what a railcar holds) to deliver to my yard - so I would have to agree that the fuel cost for the train is cheaper.
BUT -
That is only true IF the manufacturer is located near a rail line, if the consignee is in a city that the train stops and unloads at, and if the distance is long enough. Trucks are more cost efficient for short trips.
The biggest reason, though, that trains will never challenge the trucking market is the delivery time. I can release 4 truckloads of steel and have them two days later. When I release a railcar of steel, it arrives 2 weeks later. I have seen railcars get lost, regularly, and take over 3 weeks to arrive. And the railroad does not compensate you for the lost time. You have to carry a much larger inventory on hand to allow for the unpredictable delivery time. All that costs money.
So, while the claim for lower costs per ton per mile might be true, shipping by rail as an option is reserved for only a very small segment of industry.
If you’re going to include that, you’d also have to include the fuel used for constructing and maintaining highways. I suspect both are negligible compared to the fuel directly used by the truck/train carrying the cargo - do you have reason to believe differently?
They can’t be always running full. What’s in the tanker trucks when they arrive at the oil refinery (or distribution center, or whatever)? What’s in the Walmart truck when it arrives at a Walmart distribution center? Maybe all multi-purpose trucks are full when running between cities, but there must be substantial wasted gas, e.g. when a truck unloads at one business and drives over to another business in the same city to load? Or idling while waiting to load/unload?
So what’s a typical figure for ton-miles of cargo carried by a given truck in a month, divided by the amount of gas used by that truck in that month?