Time to revisit electrification?

Railway Age, Sept, 2008 by William C. Vantuono

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Even though railroads are many more times fuel-efficient than trucks and have not been hurt as badly by soaring diesel fuel prices as their rubber-tired rivals, they're looking at additional ways to lower fuel costs.

One of these is electrification. Other than two captive coal mine-to-power plant operations in the West that operate 1970s-vintage General Electric E60s (Black Mesa & Lake Powell Railroad and Deseret-Western Railway), electrification hasn't been employed by a U.S. freight railroad since 1982, when Conrail dismantled what little remained of the catenary it had inherited from the Penn Central (and which the Pennsylvania Railroad had originally built in the 1930s).

The last time the railroads seriously looked at electrification was during the oil crisis of the mid-1970s. EMD, then a division of General Motors, produced two experimental freight electrics in 1975 and 1976, the GMC6C and GM10B (pictured, above). Both were developed in cooperation with Sweden's ASEA, which also worked with EMD on Amtrak's AEM-7 electric passenger locomotive for the Northeast Corridor. (Canada's B.C. Rail bought several GM6C-derived GF6Cs; these were in service until electrified operations were discontinued in 2000.) The last electric locomotive built by GE was the E60C-2 in 1983, for National Railways of Mexico, whose electrification between Queretaro and Mexico City was dismantled by TFM (now KCSM) for double-stack clearance purposes.

The mid-'70s oil crisis passed, and diesel-electric technology improved. Electrification was quickly forgotten.

Welcome back, sort of, to the '70s. With diesel fuel approaching $5.00 a gallon and the railroads tasked with meeting tightening environmental regulations, electrification is getting another look, but with an approach much different than that taken with the railroad electrification projects of the first half of the 20th century. There is a proposal to generate large quantifies of electricity for public use with banks of wind turbines that would be built along the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, and to transmit that power to places where it's needed most, like California. Instead of acquiring land and building thousands of miles of high-tension lines, why not piggyback on an existing right-of-way--like a railroad?

This is the scenario BNSF Railway is investigating. The railroad already leases its transcontinental rights-of-way to fiberoptic companies in exchange for capacity for communications and data transmission. In exchange for access to discounted electric traction power for trains, BNSF could lease right-of-way space to an electric utility, tapping into the high-tension lines for 25kV or 50kV catenary to power electric or perhaps even dual-power locomotives (RA, August, p. 12). There would be technical and financial challenges--erecting catenary poles and wire and substations; overhead wire doublestack clearances; bridge and tunnel modifications; the higher cost of electric locomotives compared to diesel; the need for people and equipment to operate and maintain the power grid, for example--but if the economics of electric vs. diesel power can be worked out, electrification may make sense.

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Railways overseas that are not already electrified are taking a serious look. "The British government has just done a U-turn on electrification in light of soaring energy prices and soaring rail traffic, both of which make the case for electrification much more compelling," reports International Railway Journal Editor David Briginshaw. "Electric locomotives should be easier and cheaper to maintain than diesels, and they are more powerful, so fewer electric locomotives are needed per train than diesels. And if you start ordering large numbers of electric locomotives, then the price per unit should come down. Strategically, an electric train is the only mode of transport that can be powered, at its source, by any type of fuel or energy production device."

India Railways appears to have solved problems of electrifying lines carrying doublestack container trains, Briginshaw says, and has just completed a trial which indicates that it is feasible. "One of India's new, dedicated freight corridors will be for doublestacks," he says. "IR was originally going to operate the trains with diesel traction, but now it looks as though they can electrify."

There is also the development of high-voltage d.c. (HVDC) systems that are said to have lower transmission losses than a.c. systems. ABB Power Distribution, U.K., is working on "classic HVDC" and "HVDC Lighff[R]," which uses underground or submarine cables.

For railroads like BNSF, whose predecessor roads Great Northern and Milwaukee Road had electrified segments, electrification is a long-term prospect. But with energy costs steadily rising for American consumers and the railroads demonstrating their superior fuel efficiency and environmental friendliness, electrification may one day prove a win-win situation for both.