A retired nuclear engineer from Sandia National Laboratories, no less, recently got a letter published in the Albuquerque Journal "Outlook" business section. We can't link you to the article here, but we will summarize. We won't name the engineer because it is not our intention to embarass him, just to point out some salient facts.
Mr. Retired Engineer wants to know why we don't just shift every bloomin' truckload off the highways and onto the rails. He has realized that the saving in crew costs and the savings in fuels would be tremendous.
Next, Mr. R.E. suggests that we pull the freight train with nuclear powered locomotives. (Then he goes a little off the deep end and suggests that the whole Navy should go nuclear and we should use nuclear powered desalination plants to provide fresh water.)
We are going to give Mr. R. E. the benefit of the doubt and assume he is a scientist and well educated. We are also going to assume that he is in the habit of applying logical thinking to problem solving.
With those assumptions, we can only conclude that Mr. R. E. looks at the railroad tracks in his neighborhood and assumes that, because trains are not flowing like trucks on the highway, the tracks are underutilized. This may be the case, but since he is in New Mexico and abreast of the BNSF Transcon, we can only assume that he is ignorant of what it takes in cost, manpower, maintenance and environmental impact to increase the capacity of our freight rail system. (The Transcon is always running at capacity.)
This is not a blog about Freight Rail, but this is true of Passenger Rail, too. The general public has no idea of the cost of increased capacity, or of the lead time necessary to create such capacity. This appears to be a problem with public perception in general and it applies to more than just railroads. (Think oil and gas and refineries.)
Then there are the nuclear locomotives. Mr. R. E., those of us in our 60s now all thought this would happen long ago. But there are a few problems, one of which is weight. Diesel power happens to be extraordinarily suited to the tractive force vs. engine weight equation. Yes, most diesels as they came from the factory will provide more tractive force with more weight and get better fuel economy. But weight increases track forces, track wear, and hence track maintenance.
Another problem with all of this is public inertia. The general public thinks "China Syndrome" and "Three Mile Island" when it thinks nuclear. The general public, thanks to the media, also thinks toxic hazardous material spill, death, and litigation when it thinks of railroads. That's why there is a movement afoot for cities to get railroads to build bypasses.
The NIMBYs control what happens next. Some of this goes back to the weight equation. So much radiation shielding would be required that weight would be prohibitive.
Only one way could be devised to nuke all locomotives. Build a land-based power plant and feed the power through standard catenary ala Northeast Corridor to electric locomotives. Voila! But see my comments re: costs below.
It's a real hoot to think of trying to drive a nuclear powered locomotive through any inhabited area, let alone also pulling a train full of potentially toxic materials through a heavily populated one. It's nice that Mr. R. E. still has the naive sense of the invincibility of science that probably brought him to become a research scientist.
Unfortunately, in the land of railroading, be it Freight or Passenger Rail, we have to get real. And reality is, we would have to quadruple the capacity of freight railroads, or pentuple it if we increase Amtrak routes, in order to even come close to carrying half the freight that highway trucks now carry. If we started now and spent TRILLIONS of dollars, it would take us at the very least a DECADE, and probably TWO DECADES to accomplish this. (Maybe three decades if we have to build new electric facilities, catenary and the locomotives to use it.) This writer and Mr. R. E. may not live to see it.
We are truly behind the eight ball. So you younger scientists out there, please come up with ideas that will work. But keep it real. And ABQ Journal editors, if you are reading this, please use your column inches for ideas that make sense.
©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com
3 comments:
Remember this is not the first time that nuclear powered trains have been proposed. The New Haven Railroad looked into it in the fifties (one of McGuinness' bright ideas.)
I'd love to see truck traffic move back to the rails. Some thoughts on this . . .
First of all, the transcon has 90% of the market for freight between California and the midwest, east, etc. So you wouldn't actually have to quintuple it.
There are a couple markets that railroads don't have (for the most part), but could.
One is short-haul corridor piggyback moves. FEC, CP and Triple Crown have managed to make this work, while other railroads have not been able to. The market is different, MUCH more truck based (instead of containers). CP and NS have cut terminal costs (which are big) by not using cranes (which cost a lot of money to buy, but save labor - IF they are kept busy). NS uses road-railers, CP uses circus loading of flats. Tight equipment utilization is also key - NS does it by not having any (only boogies for it's roadrailers) and CP makes multiple trips a day to keep it's flatcars moving.
Another is short heavy haul movements, most especially aggregate (here in Vermont we've got a fair amount of logs). This works when you've got a locomotive and cars shuttling all day (just like the truckers), keeping the equipment utilized. Even better is running it with only one crew member.
The third market is between LTL and mail terminals. Some of this moves on intermodal now, but railroads could be a lot more sophisticated here.
The advantage of the short-haul markets is that while main lines of mostly at capacity, there are still many miles of secondary track with the capacity for more traffic.
So, because it is difficult or will take a long time, it should not be done?
Regarding the freight movement, the actual problem is simply the number of communities not served by rail. Trucks are needed to reach "branch" communities (the volumes will never add up enough to justify trains).
Intermodal yards mean that a trip can be truck Ithaca-Syracuse, train Syracuse-Albequerque, truck Albequerque-Los Cruces -- but that's the best you can do. And the number of intermodal yards is quite limited right now, and most of them still have relatively slow transfer procedures.
Over-the-road long distance trucks actually have fairly small proportions of the big, long-distance markets paralleling rail lines. They have huge proportions of the markets which don't have all-rail routes. Classic example: there's now no freight rail crossing of the Hudson River south of Albany, NY -- but there are several truck crossings. Therefore almost all freight from New England and Long Island to anywhere south of New York City goes by truck.
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