No. They wouldn’t try to sync to the grid power. They wouldn’t have the technology to sync as part of the engines regulator or generator. Why add extra complexity to a train engine ?
Besides its pointless excercise, as you use the locomotive for the case of a blackout.
What are you syncing to ? Ok you could think about sync’ing two generators, but what the heck, why risk the two working generators just to sync ? You could blow up both and have nothing.
Just split the load.
I was going to post and say that What Exit? was a nuke electrician’s mate, if I recall correctly, so the synchroscope was absolutely in his bag of tricks at the time.
As a nuke machinist’s mate, I was familiar with the process only at a high level “cross training” kind of way.
And every electrician’s mate seems to have a story of a guy who shut the breaker crazily out of phase and watched the turbogenerator jump 
I was conventional EM, USS Ranger was an oil burner and now sadly scrap metal.
Any idea why they chose to move the locomotive, rather than run power cables to it?
This discussion: Locomotives as emergency portable generators? - Trains Magazine - Trains News Wire, Railroad News, Railroad Industry News, Web Cams, and Forms notes that power lines were down so they moved the locomotive down the street where it could access ground cables. But why not run cables to the locomotive only 1,000 feet away? Would’t that be a much simpler operation?
I think the obvious answer is that they needed it off the tracks so rail interruption was not an issue.
That ice storm saw some communities without power for a couple of months. It was brutal.
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With the approval of the city government, or just because he derailed and was slow on the brake? There’s a difference. 
Derailer will get it off the tracks if that’s all you need, those you can find any any railway shed. To line it up with the street they wanted it to travel down, they could have used one of those industrial tow trucks (like they use for city buses) or a sufficiently large crane.
The article mentions that the street was destroyed, and the locomotive damaged. (Presumably it needed its wheels replaced.)
Just a little too much to drink and he ran out of track at full throttle.
Not his fault, that could happen to anyone!
I hope he didn’t run out of track at a station like this poor schmuck: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbm=isch&q=montparnasse+steam+locomotive. Absent seat belts that hadda hurt.
In all the discussion about phase syncing (which as mentioned is kind of pointless during a blackout), has anyone considered how to match the load to what the locomotive can produce? It seems like a lot of diesel locos are in the 3,000 hp (2,250 kW) range, which is enough to power about 1,500 homes under normal load. Here in Cincinnati I count 50 distribution substations within the city limits, some admittedly much larger than others, but that works out to an average of 6,000 people per substation or about 2,800 homes. So even if you managed to hook up to one of the average substations, you’d get partial power to the grid (a brownout) before the locomotive either stalls or trips its breakers, and you won’t get your 60 Hz anyway under such an overload condition. All this assumes you can effectively isolate the substation from the transmission and subtransmission grids to prevent backfeeding power up the line. If you can’t, then the poor locomotive is trying to feed the whole city if not more. That’s why solar panel installs require transfer switches, to prevent backfeeding to the distribution grid and potentially electrocuting linemen trying to fix the blackout.
Earlier in this thread it was mentioning that when it was tried in Quebec, the locomotive they used was limited to 1400 horsepower because it had to run at a lower RPM to reach 60 Hz.
It wasn’t used to supply the theoretical 1500 homes because like you said, where would you plug it in? You’d have to do substantial wiring changes to the local substation supplying those 1500 homes, and those whole thing would have been frozen solid, covered in ice, and impractical to work on.
They just connected the locomotive to a local civic building, so at least that building had power, and I guess city residents could huddle in the warmth there. Probably the heating was actually coming from burning fuel oil or propane or natural gas, so the locomotive was actually just powering the lights and the fans to run the furnace.
It would have been easier to simply design the building wiring to isolate the important circuits (lights, ventilation fans, furnace blowers, sewage pumps, refrigerators and freezers) onto separate sub-panels, and then have backup generators installed to power those circuits during power outages. Giving those sub-panels generator inlets so that portable generators could be used if the hardwired backup generator fails would also be smart.
They must have been in some dire straights to try this locomotive trick.
The utility will monitor the electrical usage. and as it approaches the limit on the generator they will begin to load shed until it is under the limit.
^ You make it sound easy. I don’t think the distribution grid is that sophisticated.
Varies by area actually. My limited understanding is that some of the southern grids are that sophisticated as they are much newer than the grid in New Jersey as a counter example.
There’s the grid, and then there’s the grid. I know most substations are computer controlled, and I suspect they could isolate a substation from the transmission (long-distance) grid by flipping a switch somewhere, but once you get to the local (under about 10,000 people) distribution grid, I’m not so sure. Yes there’s plenty of power conditioners, capacitors, and other load-balancing equipment in the distribution grid, but isn’t most of that kind of self-contained and not really controllable from afar? That doesn’t even get into how to cut off parts of the distribution grid, which may even loop back on itself to provide redundancy rather than operating in a strictly radial fashion from the substation.