Railroad info of North America

[asajosh]

great info, tyvm

[J. Lionheart]

Thanks for the maps

In the DR game I GM'd most recently, the rail line was a big player. With me tracking it on google maps, my players lined up plans to follow it all the way out of a big infested metro area to get to the Safe Havens in the country beyond. I myself live in Tacoma, WA - the terminus of the original transcontinental railroad, so it's definitely something on my mind too, as I look around the ol' hometown

[Thinyser]

Whats a good average fuel consumption for these locomotives?

I don't like the idea of being tied only to rail but with the rail riding pickup trucks and their ability to go on the roads and over ground it would be a pretty good set up.

[Thinyser]

Whats a good average fuel consumption for these locomotives?

I don't like the idea of being tied only to rail but with the rail riding pickup trucks and their ability to go on the roads and over ground it would be a pretty good set up.

That really depends on how heavy the train is, type of grade and etc.

Very light train say 10-15 moderatly loaded cars. Of course some heavy cars like tanker cars, others light like passenger cars, some medium like 3/4 full box cars, so over all a moderate average. And 10-15 cars is a short train from what I've seen. Flat or nearly flat grades, great plains and "mid west", basically everywhere inbetween the 2 major U.S. moutain ranges. Some hills but most hauls would be mostly flat.

Just wondering ball park on it's gallons per mile... I assume it is gallons per mile and not miles per gallon like in smaller engined vehicles.

[Thinyser]

Whats a good average fuel consumption for these locomotives?

I don't like the idea of being tied only to rail but with the rail riding pickup trucks and their ability to go on the roads and over ground it would be a pretty good set up.

That really depends on how heavy the train is, type of grade and etc.

Very light train say 10-15 moderatly loaded cars. Of course some heavy cars like tanker cars, others light like passenger cars, some medium like 3/4 full box cars, so over all a moderate average. And 10-15 cars is a short train from what I've seen. Flat or nearly flat grades, great plains and "mid west", basically everywhere inbetween the 2 major U.S. moutain ranges. Some hills but most hauls would be mostly flat.

Just wondering ball park on it's gallons per mile... I assume it is gallons per mile and not miles per gallon like in smaller engined vehicles.

For game terms I'd say about 5-10 gallons a mile for a train loaded like that on that type of grade.

Wow I knew it would be a lot but 5-10 gallons a mile is tons of fuel to consume.

I hope there are lots of diesel tankers sitting in train yards when the zompocolypse hits, because if not then finding the fuel for these beasts might be rough.

Say you want to go 200 miles you would have to stock 2000+ gallons minimum just to be sure you could make it, and probably double that just incase you run into a dead end at mile 199 and have to back track! That means you would want at least 4000+ (IMO 5000) gallons onboard just to go 200 miles.

I would think that juducious use of the throttle would help lower this closer to the 5 gallon per mile, as you could get up to speed then coast down to 30 using your momentum to cover distance instead of burning fuel the whole time but I don't know how much more milage one would sqeeze out doing this.

Being diesel electric could you let the diesel idle and use whatever energy it produces at idle to simply "idle" along the tracks at say 15-20 miles per hour? How much does an engine at idle consume?

[azazel1024]

It won't save a lot of power. The avantage of a diesel electric, well...for nautical reasons, I don't know about locomotives, is that you can run the diesel engines at the most efficient engine speed possible, and then use the electric drive to move the ship at whatever speed you want. This is unlike a steam turbine or a direct drive diesel where the engine is gear or direct drive and you can only spin the engine at the speed you want to be going...which might not be a very efficient engine speed. Gets a bit more efficiency, it also allows you to fully reverse the engine, you have the same power output going forward or backward (saved a few ships in WWII with bow damage as they got to port by sailing backwards the whole way).

Not sure if diesel electrics are hybrid systems that can use regenerative braking or not, though that likely wouldn't save much fuel as trains tend not to be stop and go vehicles.

For fuel, yeah it is a boat load. However, think of how much you can carry on one. The average fuel tanker truck, the 18 wheeler type, carries between 5-10,000 gallons of fuel in it. Now picture a train tanker car. I'd imagine those suckers are more like 20-30,000 gallons.

Next gas stations tend to have in the region of 30-50,000 gallons of total fuel in the tanks. You can't use gasoline in the train, but find any truck service station or even gas station with diesel and you can easily siphon a few thousand gallons supposing they haven't been dried out (and it is a lot of diesel to use up). Of course getting it to the train is going to be a bit of a challenge. I'd suggest a large pickup with a 1,000-2,000 gallon 'water tank' in the bed and an electric powered syphon pump. Stop the train outside of a town, drive in to town, hit a gas station and in a couple of trips you can top off the train's fuel tanks.

This brings up something I don't really like, is gas stations with empty tanks. I get they aren't getting fuel deliveries any more, but with the very rapid crash of civilization I'd imagine that few people would be around to drive let alone siphon gas station tanks and that would have happened quickly. An average sized gas station with 40,000 gallons in their tanks is enough to will 2,000 SUVs to the brim...that is a lot of siphoning and even if the station hadn't gotten a fresh delivery of gas, just about any station is probably going to have a few hundred gallons rattling around in its tanks after everything went to pot. Even stations that have been hit up for gas by survivors is probably still going to have some fuel left in the tanks.
-Matt

[azazel1024]

The problem with a steam engine is that with annual or semiannual rebricking of the fire box you are going to have a hard time doing that finding the right kind of bricks and doing all that work. Plus for the day or three of work you are going to be totally without a way to move the train unless you have two locomotives (not a terrible idea).

There are certainly a lot of other consumables you'd need, but if you could hit a train yard, even once, with all the storage space you have on a train you'd probably be set with 'other consumables' for a really long time. Especially if you weren't constantly on the move. If you only move the train say every few weeks and are mostly going from town to town and probably stopping outside of the towns and raiding them for supplies you could probably manage for quite some time.
-Matt

[Shorty]

The Advantage to a steam locomotive is the different types of fuel you can use, buteven that is not as much as you might think since only coal fired and wood fired can be mixed and even then the efficiency drops because there are design differences between those. Once you get into the other types, light oil, heavy oil, etc then you really might run into supply issues. Another disadvantage is the amount of water required, diesel engines need water steam engines use a TON of water and depending on design would need several hundred gallons of water every 200 miles or so. Steam locomotives are also very maintenance intensive and these days the maintenance is a rare and special skill set that not many have.

All in all, while I love steam engines, in a survival scenario they are the poorer choice. After all, if steam was better than diesel we would still be using them on main lines instead of tourist and steam buff attractions, but that is a discussion for another thread

[azazel1024]

I was only thinking of coal/wood where you have an actual fire box...mostly because of the heavy/light oil issues with those types of steam engines, a bigger nightmare then coal/wood would face.
-Matt

[Thinyser]

Thing is also with a diesel electric locomotive they have 3 differet types of brakes dynamic (simular to reverse thrusters of a jet), independant air brake (locomotive), and train brakes (entire train). That's why I said and an earlier post that I'd have 2 or more locomotives on the head end of a lil train. 2 fuel tankers of diesel 30,000-50,000 gallons. Idleing a Diesel electric motor burns about 30 gallons a hour give or take. Nice thing is about a locomotive it can run on straight crude oil I wouldn't do it for long but in a pinch it'll work.

So striaght cooking oil might be almost as good as diesel!

So my question is how fast can a train idle? 10 mph? 20? 30?

Even if you could squeeze 15 miles per hour out of it thats only 2 gallons per mile instead of 5-10 gallons per mile.

Heck even 10 mph at 30 gallons an hour would only be 3 gallons per mile...

Ah screw it, I'd figure out a way to use solar to power the electric motors for low "idle like" speeds and use diesel when i really wanted to make good time.

[Thinyser]

Thing is also with a diesel electric locomotive they have 3 differet types of brakes dynamic (simular to reverse thrusters of a jet), independant air brake (locomotive), and train brakes (entire train). That's why I said and an earlier post that I'd have 2 or more locomotives on the head end of a lil train. 2 fuel tankers of diesel 30,000-50,000 gallons. Idleing a Diesel electric motor burns about 30 gallons a hour give or take. Nice thing is about a locomotive it can run on straight crude oil I wouldn't do it for long but in a pinch it'll work.

So striaght cooking oil might be almost as good as diesel!

So my question is how fast can a train idle? 10 mph? 20? 30?

Even if you could squeeze 15 miles per hour out of it thats only 2 gallons per mile instead of 5-10 gallons per mile.

Heck even 10 mph at 30 gallons an hour would only be 3 gallons per mile...

Ah screw it, I'd figure out a way to use solar to power the electric motors for low "idle like" speeds and use diesel when i really wanted to make good time.

Get it up to speed and a slight down hill and you can idle at 60mph plus or on River grade (very flat). When I'm at work I look over to see if we're in idle or throttle or dynamic brake and look at our speed.

You'd have to have the entire train covered in solar panels to make solar powered work. The traction motors take ALOT of juice.

Well assuming that the full 3000 horsepower are converted to electricity (which I'm sure is not the case) thats 2.237 megawatts of power which yes is gonna take a lot of solar pannels. At idle I bet it makes 1/4th as much (or less) hp than its peak 3000 and I'm sure that the energy conversion is not 100% efficient though its likley very high say 90%. So if you could get say .6 megawatts out of a solar system I'd think it would give enough juice to "idle" down the track and if you used the diesel to get up to speed then switched over to pure solar it would greatly extend your range.

.6 megawatts is 60,000 watts. That is certainly a lot but if you got even the low end of 160 watts out of these then you would only need 375 of them to get you .6MW. And these first gen panels are only convert 11% of the light to electricity. Get the higher end of 220w per panel and you only need 273. if you get more efficient panels then you would get down to 200 to 250 panels needed.

These are really light to begin with and this little extra weight is really nothing to a train. I bet if you had a 30 car train and you plastered these things on both sides and the roof you would get more than .6MW... maybe even up to 1 full megawatt.

Whats an average number of cars for a freight train?

[azazel1024]

The more cars the more power you need though. Finding that many solar panels is not going to be easy.

By the way you were off by an order of magnitude, .6mw is 600,000 watts or 600kw. So you'd need 3,750 of those panels...that is a HUGE number. I doubt you could cover the train with enough to generate half the output of that 3,000hp diesel engine. Enough to suplement the diesel motor sure, probably even enough to run it at really low speed, but you'd still need an enormous number. Thinking of raiding a solar panel manufacturing plant?

I would deffinitely raid as many solar panels as I could, more for powering the train with the engine off for those times when the train is at rest. That way you don't need to idle the train engine or suck up diesel/gas to power an APU while the main engine is off.

Yes, you can run any diesel engine on straight vegetable oil (SVO). I mentioned it in a vehicle modification thread awhile back. That is one of the first things I would do is find a diesel vehicle and modify it so that it can run on SVO. Actually just about any cooking oil will do, so long as it has a relatively low flash point. Canola also works (it has one of the lowest flash points of a cooking oil), I think olive oil will also work, peanut oil might not as it has a very high flash point.

Most current SVO systems for a diesel vehicle use a seperate tank for SVO, filters, lines and injectors and you can switch between the diesel fuel tank and the SVO tank whenever you want. Gives you nice flexibility (you cannot mix SVO and diesel together in the tank, bad idea).

So with a train you could do it, but I don't think it would be particularly worth while. Where are you going to find thousands of gallons of SVO? Your better off on one of the cars making a biodiesel 'still' to convert anything you find if you want to supplement your regular diesel, even then it would probably be drops in a bucket. Raiding a groccery store and grabbing 50 or 60 gallons of SVO can be worthwhile for a truck, or several trucks, but that is only a few miles for a train, but easily a few refills of SVO for a pickup or SUV. Heck even a Semi that isn't a terrible fillup.

I think your best bet with a train, other then heading to the great white north or Alaska with it as quickly as you can, is to avoid big cities, stay on the secondary tracks heading through/by small towns and stopping whenever you can until you start attracting zombie attention and then moving on. Stop a mile or two outside of a town, leave a few people to guard the train and then send everyone else in to raid the town for supplies. Radios would be key to communicate between the train and the raiding party. Ramps for being able to drive right up on the last car or two of the train would be useful as well for a quick getaway and those rail conversions as well for a scout car/truck or two ahead and behind the train with CB radios to report track conditions, watch for zombies and bandits.
-Matt

[Thinyser]

The more cars the more power you need though. Finding that many solar panels is not going to be easy.

By the way you were off by an order of magnitude, .6mw is 600,000 watts or 600kw. So you'd need 3,750 of those panels...that is a HUGE number. I doubt you could cover the train with enough to generate half the output of that 3,000hp diesel engine. Enough to suplement the diesel motor sure, probably even enough to run it at really low speed, but you'd still need an enormous number. Thinking of raiding a solar panel manufacturing plant?

I would deffinitely raid as many solar panels as I could, more for powering the train with the engine off for those times when the train is at rest. That way you don't need to idle the train engine or suck up diesel/gas to power an APU while the main engine is off.

Yes, you can run any diesel engine on straight vegetable oil (SVO). I mentioned it in a vehicle modification thread awhile back. That is one of the first things I would do is find a diesel vehicle and modify it so that it can run on SVO. Actually just about any cooking oil will do, so long as it has a relatively low flash point. Canola also works (it has one of the lowest flash points of a cooking oil), I think olive oil will also work, peanut oil might not as it has a very high flash point.

Most current SVO systems for a diesel vehicle use a seperate tank for SVO, filters, lines and injectors and you can switch between the diesel fuel tank and the SVO tank whenever you want. Gives you nice flexibility (you cannot mix SVO and diesel together in the tank, bad idea).

So with a train you could do it, but I don't think it would be particularly worth while. Where are you going to find thousands of gallons of SVO? Your better off on one of the cars making a biodiesel 'still' to convert anything you find if you want to supplement your regular diesel, even then it would probably be drops in a bucket. Raiding a groccery store and grabbing 50 or 60 gallons of SVO can be worthwhile for a truck, or several trucks, but that is only a few miles for a train, but easily a few refills of SVO for a pickup or SUV. Heck even a Semi that isn't a terrible fillup.

I think your best bet with a train, other then heading to the great white north or Alaska with it as quickly as you can, is to avoid big cities, stay on the secondary tracks heading through/by small towns and stopping whenever you can until you start attracting zombie attention and then moving on. Stop a mile or two outside of a town, leave a few people to guard the train and then send everyone else in to raid the town for supplies. Radios would be key to communicate between the train and the raiding party. Ramps for being able to drive right up on the last car or two of the train would be useful as well for a quick getaway and those rail conversions as well for a scout car/truck or two ahead and behind the train with CB radios to report track conditions, watch for zombies and bandits.
-Matt

Doh I so missed a 0 on the 60,000 when I did the math you're right, its not gonna happen.

[azazel1024]

's okay, it happens to the best of us (by best of us I mean me )
-Matt