Had he been drinking?
Carriers and for that matter most US Navy ships have all the correct gear to power and sync to the grid. I’m not sure a locomotive does. Also a locomotive would provide far less power than even a conventionally fueled ship, never mid a nuclear carrier.
Almost every time we pulled into a port though we would rig shore power with very heavy duty cable and then at each of the 8 switch boards we would sync to shore power and then be able to shut down our generators. We did this enough to rarely cause issues. We had drills syncing 1 generator to the rest and had our best watch-standers generally on watch for the shore-power syncing.
I’m 28 years removed from this activity now and so don’t recall what our total power generation would be, but even a carrier was just a drop in the bucket for a city. But if they were nearby and could be isolated we could easily power a hospital and some nearby buildings.
Can you 'splain how a 10-pole alternator at 720 RPM can produce single-phase 60Hz output? I may be misunderstanding, but ISTM that a 10-pole @ 720 RPM will just produce ten-phase power at 12Hz. 
Generators have either a multiple of 2 or 3 poles. Pairs of poles gets you single phase, triples, three phase. So a ten pole generator is 5 pairs. Each revolution you get 5 single phase cycles. 5 * 720rpm = 3600cycles per minute = 60 Hz.
Syncing to the grid is actually fairly easy. You need to match the voltage and the frequency. Once you are running at 60 Hz (or close to it), all you need to do is connect a light bulb to your generator’s output and the grid. Since the grid frequency and the generator frequency won’t be exactly the same, they’ll basically drift in and out of phase with each other. The closer you get the frequencies to each other, the slower the drift.
When they are at exactly the opposite phase in their AC cycles, the light bulb will be fully lit. When they are in phase, the light will go out. All you need to do is get them close enough in frequency that the light bulb slowly fades in and out, and while the light is completely out, slam the switch shut that connects the generator to the grid.
Power plants (and probably aircraft carriers) have a fancy meter called a synchroscope which tells you exactly how far out of phase the two are from each other. When the synchroscope reads zero, you slam the switch shut. If you have a really fancy setup, it will close the switch for you when the two are in phase.
But a light bulb and a little know-how is all you really need.
If you are using 3 phase, you need three light bulbs, one for each phase.
Once the generator is connected to the grid, it ends up being phase locked with the grid. If you try to slow the generator down, it becomes a motor and the grid speeds it back up. If you try to speed the generator up, it just ends up supplying more power to the grid.
And if you don’t wait for the light bulb to go out (or pulse very slowly) before you connect, your generator goes flying off the bench and you get an F for that session of rotating machinery lab.
Sounds like the voice of experience. 
One group in our class had two of the phase wires reversed on a 3 phase generator. The results weren’t any better. 
(in our case the breakers tripped before the generator came apart)
Or the shaft’s weaklink shears and you taxi back to the gate and cancel the flight. Oops. Live and learn. Where’s that :shrug: smilie when I need it? 
Single or other phase depends on the arrangement of the stator (the stationary part) windings. The 60’s-70’s vintage AC-DC locomotive alternators of the major North American manufacturers were/are 3 phase, three separate sets of stator windings at 120 degrees to one another. Five pairs of poles rotating at 12 times a second (720 rpm), each N pole followed by an S pole, reverse the current in each of three stator windings 60 times a second. If there was just one winding, the output frequency would still be 60hz with 10 poles at 720 rpm, but single phase.
I’m going to guess you’re talking about something different than what I think you’re talking about but using jet engines for electricity is very common. Some slight mods to direct exhaust (and noise) up and away from where the people are and a gear box so the output is the speed and torque you want it to be, and you’re good to go.
Of course, if you mean connecting it electrically, instead of mechanically, then I wouldn’t know. If had to guess, I would guess there’s got to be some kind of Hz reducer out there somewhere. Maybe some kind of motor that operates on the voltage and Hz supplied by the source (the plane) but on the output side it can pick off a proper sine wave? Maybe it could just mechanically reduce down to 60 (or a multiple of 60) RPMs and make a generator around the final output shaft?
No idea, never thought about that. But, if you had a plane and a generator that needed to be spun, ISTM, the easiest thing to do would be to make a direct connection from the turbine to the generator and hope for the best.
So what I’m wondering is how you get a locomotive off the rails so you can run it on the streets to the destination? Also, does it leave permanent damage to the street?
Like this, with a big crane. (That’s a picture of them putting the locomotive back onto the track, but I’m sure it was the same process.) It probably weighs about 125 tons, but it looks like the crane is only lifting half of the locomotive at a time.
And yes, some of the cites above mention damage to pavement, and also damage to the locomotives.
Synchroscop, that was the tool. Thank you. And it was indeed 3 phase. We had someone slam it home 180° out of phase once. It was very loud!
From right upthread
During the winter of 1998, a severe ice storm cut off power to many homes and businesses in Ontario and Quebec. CN M-420 3502 was hoisted off the rails by crane and rolled along a street in Boucherville QC in order to provide power in the community. The engine was driven approximately 1,000 feet (305 m) under its own power to the city hall, where it then became a portable power generator.[4] M-420 3508 was also lifted from the tracks to provide power to a school being used as a shelter, but problems prevented this from happening, and 3508 remained on standby. Both engines suffered minor gear case damage and carved grooves in the pavement.
Bolding mine.
My bad. One question : why the gear case damage? Was this from the locomotives digging into the pavement so much that the bottom of the gear case was scraping along the pavement?
I was talking about the same idea discussed here with the OP’s locomotives and other posters’ ships & subs: run a power cord from the output of the vehicle’s electrical generators to the input side of the wiring of a building or neighborhood.
In the thread I linked somebody mentions the fact that GE and others make versions of their aero-engines that directly drive utility electrical generators. He even included a link to their marketing materials. It’s really quite common. As you say.
That thread also discusses how various frequencies of AC power are created and used nowadays in airplanes, in utility class wind turbines, and how conversions are done these days. Back in the 1920s motor-generator sets were used for all sorts of utility-scale conversions. Nowadays utilities use a truly ginormous equivalent of a wall-wart to convert AC to AC or DC to AC with no moving parts & very low losses.
All of which is pretty irrelevant to supplying a town in an emergency ideally using little more than a (very :)) heavy duty extension cord, but is fun to learn about.
Two years before I attended the maritime academy that happened.
The proper way is to have the generator not on line turning slightly faster than the buss. You watch the lights as they go bright to dim pull in just as the lights go out pull the generator onto the line. Or if you are using a scope have it turning clockwise and pull in just as the hand on the scope gets to the top. With the generator going just a little faster than the line the generator will pick up a small load. Then you can increase the governor and load to the generator coming on line. If you try to bring a generator on line with generator running slightly slower it will motor and the reverse current relay will trip the generator off line.
If you pull in way out of phase then it can get ugly.
Normally the correct way to bring a ship onto shore power is to open the generator buss breaker and close the shore power breaker. The run around the engineering spaces and restart all the motors that stopped.
What went wrong was at the end of cruise home port. As soon as shore power is connected the shutting down the engine room begins. Taking it to cold iron. It was decided that the engine room could be shut down quicker by paralleling with PG&E and starting shut sown. But the Midshipman got excited and pulled when the lights were the brightest. 180 degrees out of phase. Blew every breaker between Frisco and Vallejo. Including the fuses on the dock at the Academy. PG&E was pissed and sent a large bill to the Academy. And can you guess where the last breakers and fuses were replaced? Coast Guard had a visit with the Engineering Officers.
The reason for this is that any of these (ships, locomotives, jet planes, etc.) are all so much less efficient than an actual generator designed for that purpose.
That’s why you see this suggested only in emergencies, for short periods of time. And with the speed of shipping now, sending in a portable generator is increasingly more likely. Plus the fact that it’s becoming more common for ‘critical’ installations, like hospitals, emergency centers, server farms, communications facilities, etc. to have their own emergency generator installed. (Heck, telephone central exchanges have had them for 125 years.) So such emergency uses will probably decline.
You know, for series hybrid cars (where there’s a large battery pack and also an engine), none of what you said about efficiency is true. In modern hybrid cars, there’s an electronics board called an inverter that can produce sine waves of many frequencies - including 60 hz. (depending on how many poles are in the motor, that would be somewhere around 900 to 3600 RPM generally for the electric drive motor)
It’s quite practical, and possible in some models of electric car, to add a power shunt and a plug so that you can use the drive motor inverter to produce power that could be used by a house or a building.
Of course, you’d soon run out of battery, the biggest hybrids have only 100 kWhs stored. But some models will have engines that you could keep refueling. This would be highly efficient, with minimal losses.
Essentially everyone’s car would be a generator. Frequency matching is entirely possible if the inverter firmware supports it.
This isn’t really the case. The generators are pretty good, and the diesel engines are quite good.
A very large diesel - the size you put in a ship is one of the most efficient ways of burning fuel there is, only beaten by a combined cycle gas turbine. Because it isn’t as easy to cool a locomotive engine, they don’t get quite the same levels of efficiency, but they are still better than any small engine.
By itself a jet plane has no way of generating much power - it only has generators aboard designed to run the plane. So they are basically useless.* The engines however often form the base of a power station gas turbine. You can either take power off the shaft or you can add a separate turbine on the end to turn the generator. Either way it is very efficient. Adding heat recover to make a combined cycle and you have the best there is. (But the whole system isn’t exactly small.)
Power station level systems are very carefully honed to top efficiency, that is true. Tricks like cooling the generators with hydrogen to remove every last of the losses possible, but we are in the margins of percentages here, not a gross difference that renders the locomotive or ship useless.
Diesel-electric locomotives are the default configuration for any large loco. They are quite capable of putting a very large fraction of the power generated by the engine into the wheels.
*One example I like, is the Growler. Basically an FA-18 it slings a range of EM pods under the wings. One pod is the transmitter. Very big beefy broadband transmitter. This pod is not powered from the aircraft. It has its own ram-air generator. Lots of good reasons for this, but it is indicative of how much power aircraft systems are easily able to provide past the craft’s own needs.