"No soup for you!" - Yev Kassem (from Seinfeld)
stmtrolleyguy wrote:After all these years, maybe it was finally cheaper to improve the tunnel ventilation then it was to purchase locomotives with a more "specialty" design?
There are only a handful of ventilated tunnels in North America -- Moffat, Mount Macdonald, Cascade, and Flathead are the only western tunnels I can think of with active ventilation plants. None of these tunnels would be operable using any type of diesel-electric motive power without ventilation plants. These ventilation plants are to remove exhaust and provide clean air for human respiration and engine combustion, not to remove heat. The tunnel motor variant was not designed for these very long tunnels.
The relative location of cooling air intakes on EMD and GE locomotives has no relationship with market share now or in the past.
Improvements in locomotive emissions under Tier 1 and Tier 2 actually place a greater demand on cooling.
RWM
Timber Head Eastern Railroad "THE Railroad Through the Sierras"
.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.