Full steam ahead for US railways (BBC News)
 

The BBC's Kevin Connolly visits New Mexico as he investigates the continuing success of the US railroad.

More from BBC News...

Amazingly efficient engines in the US,

"Rail travel is vastly more environmentally friendly than road transport - American trains can shift a ton of fuel over 478 miles on a single gallon of diesel fuel for example."

I wonder where the BEEB got that little bit of information from.
Wish my car was that efficient.
John (G)

I wondered about that statistic ! At first glance it sounds impressive,but ?

How many gallons (British or US ?) in a ton ??

Well it seems a US gallon of diesel weighs 7.3 lbs.

So a ton is 2000 lbs and 2000 divided by 7.3 = 274 gallons per ton.

So if you knew the total weight of fuel in a trainload of tankers you could work out the cost of loco fuel per mile, that might mean something.

For a diesel engine to be that efficient one has to be getting close to discovering the secret of perpetual motion!:rolleyes:

Cheers, 62440:D

Perhaps one of our American members could tell me a few details.

A typical trainload of fuel tanks - how many per train and the capacity of each tanker.

Lots of assumptions here !:D

Take a train of 50 off 23,000 US gallon tankers.

Total fuel weight would be 4,200 tons and therefore total loco fuel used for the 478 mile journey = 4200 gallons.

4200 divided by 478 = 8.78 US gallons per mile.:D (if my maths is correct)

Don't know if one loco could haul 4,200 tons though !!

Pro rata a 25 wagon train would do 4.39 US gallons per mile.

A friend at work (A fuels engineer) saw a similar statistic a couple of years ago and poo poo'd it as well initially. He then did some fag packet computations and reckoned it probably wasn't that far out in certain circumstances. Apparently you don't get anything like the drag that you do with a wheel on a rail compared to a tyre on the road and economies of scale when you start to run really long trains come to the fore.