Well folks, this evening on Modern Marvels on the History Channel, they were showing the modern diesel engines being built at EMD. The gentleman who hosting the segment said that the new locos can move a ton of freight over 200 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel.

quote:

locos can move a ton of freight over 200 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel.

Yes that is about right.

In the mid 1970s when I was hostling at Alliance, it was taking 17,500 gallons of fuel for empty/loaded coal trains to make the the 700 mile roundtrip from Alliance, Nebraska to the mine at Decker, Montana and return to Alliance. The freight hauled on the loaded half of that trip was 10,000 tons of coal. Thus 10,000 tons times 350 miles is 3,500,000 ton-miles. Divide that by 17,500 gallons and you get... 200 ton-miles per gallon, which is another way of saying 1 ton of freight moved 200 miles on a gallon. The loaded half of that roundtrip was mostly uphill thus skewing the results.

In this post and several previous posts of this thread we have seen efficiencies from 2,660 miles per ton per gallon, to 915 miles per ton per gallon, to 200 miles per ton per gallon. This shows that there is no one figure that can be given which is meaningful. It all depends upon the terrain and how heavily the entire trip is loaded.

Wyhog