423 ton miles per gallon sounds right, though. So, for a typical Multilevel, 15 cars at 3500# plus 30 tons light weight = 56 tons. That's 7.6 mpg per multilevel car x 15 vehicles = 113 vehicle mpg
My father was a colleague of Deodat Clejan at GATX, the originator of the RRollway auto ferry intermodal concept. The idea was to have an ultra wide gauge track and to have a 20-foot wide train which was side-loaded by passengers driving their cars past garage doors that opened up on the sides of the trains at station stops. There is nothing on Google about RRollway, but Google Patents turned up
http://www.google.com/patents?id=3IdfAAAAEBAJ&dq=Deodat+Clejan
which is pretty much the way I remember it as a child.
That concept never went anyplace, but my father is named on patents to do the same thing with standard-gauge railroads. Clejan lost his life in a general-aviation accident and my dad and others carried on the work. One patent was for side loading of a wide-body train that used standard gauge tracks, another was for a more conventional multi-level auto carrier but with a turntable of the auto carrier box in the style of Flexi-Van to allow end loading of individual auto carrier boxes.
People were serious about this -- among my dad's notes rescued from the red squirrels that have taken over the garage are statistics on the lengths of passenger automobiles in the 1960s for the purpose of figuring out how wide the RRollway needed to be.
The closest of the RRollway concept of passengers riding in their own cars was the never-built third element of the Claiborne Pell Northeast Corridor Demonstration project, which would have been a full double-deck car of the height of the Colorado Railcars double-decker for taking New Yorkers down to Florida. The AutoTrain Corporation implemented that Florida car ferry that Amtrak now operates, but the execution was changed to having passengers ride in coach seats (and later extra-fare sleepers), but have the autos valet-parked in those ex-CN double deck end-load auto box cars.
The car ferry idea is that since cars rule, why not join them instead of try to fight them, and I believe that Amtrak's AutoTrain has some of the highest load factors on their network. The question is whether such a thing saves any fuel to make pushing for expansion of this service a consideration for energy policy.
AutoTrain once claimed a 50 percent saving in fuel over people driving all the way, but that was back in the day of 15 highway MPG cars. There may be some fuel saving because the AutoTrain is very long and gets the aerodynamic advantage of drafting and there is the high load factor of the service. Also, there are no stops apart from crew changes or locomotive fueling or going into a siding for a meet, so you can go with the minimum of power to keep the train rolling at track speed.
But you have a low seating density per train car when you allow for the passenger train part plus the auto carrier part. The GATX/US-DOT concepts had people riding in their own cars, only stepping out to use rest rooms, food service and lounge cars, etc. Doing that, the auto carriers had to be heavier to meet safety standards and have a much better ride quality than a freight auto rack.
It looks like you could double the mileage of a Prius by carrying it on a tri-level auto carrier, but that is probably at freight train speeds where the aero drag is diminished and the main energy cost is the rolling resistance of the tonnage, and you don't have the added weight of the passenger part of the train.
It is interesting that a tri-level auto carrier, a simply enormous railroad car, weights something like 60,000 lbs, less than half the weight of a Superliner car. If you use your imagination, an Automax car is supposed to have enough room to stand up in on three levels -- imagine a 60,000 lb "Ultraliner" coach with seats for 200 people at "chair car" pitch and seating density -- talk about the fuel saving.
Technology-wise, there is nothing Amtrak is running that wouldn't be recognized in the 1950's, and there are those in the advocacy community with disdane for "lightweight trains" who seem happy to keep it that way.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
chefjavier wrote: what about the hybrid engines?
Well, since there exists exactly ONE line haul hybrid freight locomotive......
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
timz wrote: BNSF44ACams wrote:CSX is running a radio spot that states ... that the Locomotive hauling these Freight Cars gets 423 mpg.Well, yes, that's obviously untrue-- so what did they actually say? That each automobile was being transported 423 miles for each gallon the engine burned?Lessee... so let's say the train is carrying 1000 automobiles ... rolling at 50 mph on the level ... if they're right they'd be burning 118 gallons per hour ... which is impossible. So they must have meant something else.
BNSF44ACams wrote:CSX is running a radio spot that states ... that the Locomotive hauling these Freight Cars gets 423 mpg.
Well, yes, that's obviously untrue-- so what did they actually say? That each automobile was being transported 423 miles for each gallon the engine burned?
Lessee... so let's say the train is carrying 1000 automobiles ... rolling at 50 mph on the level ... if they're right they'd be burning 118 gallons per hour ... which is impossible. So they must have meant something else.
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