Yes I am mocking a previous thread title. But it's turned into a trend.
Two years ago Transnet South Africa split a tender between GE and CNR(china) which became CRRC for roughly 500 diesel locomotives.
Many obligations of the procurement terms were not upheld by CRRC, including local manufacturing, they requested to build the first 20 units in China. The first two units have been finished since April 2016 and still haven't been accepted by Transnet due to performance issues.
Article in link:
http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/exclusive-transnets-new-chinese-locomotives-fail-first-test-20170123
Switching alternators without any notification? Wow, all manner of failures here.
You get what you pay for...
These units have a contract price higher than that of the generally similar GE ES40 ACi locomotives, but I think there may be a greater degree of local build and assembly in the CRRC locomotives compared to the GE units.
Five units of the same basic design as these South African units were supplied a couple of years ago to Pacific National in Queensland Australia. These had the same basic MTU 20V4000 engine but rated at only 2550 kW compared to 3150kW for the South African units. The Australian units had the ABB alternators and no specific reliability problems were reported. The ABB alternator was a standard unit used in European locomotives and it is possible that it wasn't suitable for power as high as 4200HP.
A different design in Australia, the SDA-1 which is rated at 3000kW (4020 HP) also with the MTU 20V4000 uses Chinese alternators, and these gave a lot of trouble when new, but with design changes, they have settled down and are now providing good service.
The MTU 4000 runs at 1800 rpm at full power (twice the speed of an EMD 645, for example) and the Chinese have little experience of building alternators for high power at that speed. It seems likely that they will fix the problem fairly soon (at the manufacturers cost)
Peter
In the latest Innotrans, I saw the newest MTU R4000, the 20V version can be tuned up to 3.3 MW power (with a more 'reasonable' rating of 3.0 MW at the low end).
I think that's essentially the same performance per cylinder as an ALCo 251F engine?
N.F.
M636C These units have a contract price higher than that of the generally similar GE ES40 ACi locomotives, but I think there may be a greater degree of local build and assembly in the CRRC locomotives compared to the GE units.
So far CRRC hasn't setup manufacturing in South Africa, terms of the tender were to establish local production and CRRC requested a deviation for the first 20 units.
Yesterday I watched a loaded QUBE grain train depart Goulburn NSW Australia. It had two CRRC SDA-1 units QBX 005 leading QBX 004 on 45 loaded grain hoppers. It was limited to 10 km/h across the yard ladder and the crossover to the mnorthbound main so it approached quietly. These have the 20V4000R53 rated at 3000 KW. They have a very distinctive sound, rather metallic, quite unlike the Cummins QSK 78 (a V-18) that sounds like a really big truck engine. The second QBX smoked very obviously on throttling up, which surprised me. Not as badly as a GE FDL, but we weren't expecting it.
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