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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by CShaveRR That 125-gallon-per-hour figure might be a good place to start, since the F40s have engines that run at a constant speed. For the sake of this argument, I'm assuming that a gallon of diesel fuel is as environmentally friendly as a gallon of gasoline. Don't know which is really friendlier. If you're driving a car on an intercity run, and you get 30 miles per gallon while traveling at 60 m.p.h., you're using two gallons per hour. If you have a total of four people in the car, your gallons-per-passenger-hour would be 0.5. The intercity train powered by an F40, burning a steady 125 gallons per hour, would have to be hauling 250 passengers to match that. What's that--about four coaches full? In commute traffic, the same car is going to get nowhere near 30 mpg, but the same F40 will still burn 125 gph. The car will be lucky to get 1 gph, and will probably not have added passengers to make it more efficient. The commuter F40 can haul 125 passengers easily in one coach (they have a capacity of roughly 160). Those rush-hour trains can have ten or more cars behind one F40, so there's no doubting the environmental friendliness of the commuter train over the car. Intercity is a tossup at best. The F40 has been supplanted, at least in commuter service, by newer locomotives that boast greater fuel efficiency, at least according to the publicity. That would improve the railroad side even further. [/quote] You also need to add the fuel consumption used in driving from one's home to the rail station and back. A more accurate way of figuring "real" fuel consumption attributable to mass transit must include this segment of the commute. What is the total fuel consumption from home to office and back (not just station to station)? A similar oversight is committed by the freight railroads when they trump the improved fuel savings attributable to use of unit trains. The consolidation of unit train terminals comes at a cost to the more far reaching carload network. As consolidation continues, the shipper must travel farther and farther from the commodity's point of origin to the nearest railhead, and they must do so using a less efficient transportation mode in the form of trucks. So although efficiency increases on the rail segment, it decreases on the other segments. At one time for ag commodities it was possible to reach a viable railhead within an average of 25 miles from the point of origin, now the average truck haul to the railhead is in the hundreds of miles. Except for the longest of rail hauls, it is probable that rail terminal consolidation has actually resulted in an increase in fuel consumption for certain target commodities.
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