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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by jacobweber2000 ... your question didnt exactly mention if your engine was on or off, or how much it was being used that one day. [/quote] That actually raises a good point, and another question.... Why do railroads have the engines idling for such long periods between jobs? For instance, at the Lithonia 'yard' (not really a yard, just about 6 tracks where they store and shuffle cars for the local industry jobs) pre-9/11 I would sit across the street waiting for trains to pass, and the engines assigned to local switching duty would often be parked there, idling for hours on end. I seem to remember sitting and watching one afternoon where they sat for 4 hours just idling and only two trains came through the entire time. My first assumption was that they were waiting on the tracks to clear enough so they could perform switching tasks, thus no point in shutting them down. But as I sat and watched, there wasn't any activity going on anywhere, and the time between through trains would've given them plenty of time to shuffle some cars or get a train ready to depart. Just seems to me that even a railroad with deep pockets would want to save on fuel costs, even pre-9/11 to the point that they wouldn't keep an engine running for so long when it didn't have much work to do.
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