Freight Railroad Electrification - Trains Magazine

Thanks for the link to the article by Michael Iden.  While he makes many good points, he (like many others) omits one of the biggest obstacles to the “straight electric” electrification option: The huge cost of modifying locomotive power at locations where the electrification would start or end.

He stated, “We need to electrify only the heaviest density main lines—11,900 route-miles or 19,000 track-miles (assuming 1.6 main tracks per route-mile) handling 30% of U.S. rail freight GTMs at the lowest energy cost. This points to several key corridors: Chicago to Ogden, Barstow, Buffalo and Pittsburgh, plus Vancouver-Calgary. The Powder River Basin would have been a natural candidate but is in decline.” 

Electrifying only these 11,900 route-miles will create a fantastically inefficient utilization of locomotive resources because replacement power would need to be available at power at the numerous modification locations and this would result in a large quantity of power just sitting around waiting for the next train to be modified or would result in trains holding for the “right kind” of locomotive power before continuing.  In reality, I suspect that there would still be a large percentage of trains operating with diesel-electric locomotives in the electrified territory.  And then you would also need a lot more land and build yard tracks to accommodate these trains during power modifications.

So, let’s just take the (BNSF) Chicago-to-Barstow example, except eastbound.  Forty to fifty eastbound trains (depending on the day of the week) arrive Barstow with diesel-electric power. 70% or so are through trains, mostly intermodal.  All need to have their power modified, and since many would require distributed power, that means power would need to be replaced on both the head end and rear end of the train, and for the heaviest stack trains, power would need to be replaced in the middle of the train – a modification likely to take hours unless a lot of manpower and trackage is available.  Merchandise traffic humps at Barstow, so power modification for this traffic would not be a problem.  The problem is that not all the traffic goes to Chicago or somewhere else on the Southern Transcontinental.  There are merchandise trains for Galesburg, Kansas City, Amarillo and Belen, but also for Slaton, Temple, Houston, Fort Worth, Tulsa, and Memphis – all locations not on the core electrified route. 

Moving east, the first junction of consequence is Williams Jct. where the non-electrified trains from Phoenix join the main line.  They would need power modification at Winslow.  Coal trains unloaded near Springerville, Arizona when returning to the main line probably would keep their diesel-electric power (back to Amarillo) since that’s what they departed the Powder River Basin with.  At Belen, grain empties and auto rack trains from El Paso would need to be “relayed” with all-electric locomotives.  Eastbound trains, which would normally just hang a right at the south end of the yard would need to be brought into the yard for the modification.

At Clovis – the major intermodal and auto rack block-swapping location, trains pick up, set out, annul and originate.  All the trains for Lubbock, Slaton, Temple, Houston and New Orleans need to be relayed with diesel-electric power.  At Amarillo, it’s the same story for trains destined for Fort Worth, Teague, and Denver.  Avard, Oklahoma is probably the busiest junction point where trains for Tulsa, Springfield, Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta, and St. Louis leave the Southern Transcon.  There’s nothing at Avard but the junction – so you know that these trains aren’t going to be arriving with all-electric power. 

In Kansas, many trains join the Southern Transcon from Texas and Oklahoma origin points including Houston, Temple, Fort Worth and Oklahoma City.  Alternate route running for eastbound trains between Mulvane and Ellinor via Newton would likely be discontinued as not to electrify two parallel routes.  At Mulvane, grain empties for Concordia, Abilene, and Nebraska leave the main line, and obviously wouldn’t have their power modified there.  At Kansas City, inbound trains from Tulsa, Springfield and Memphis and outbound trains for Lincoln, the Dakotas and Minnesota would all need power modifications to change from electric to diesel electric.  At the Cameron connection, presumably electrification would extend to the Galesburg yard where many merchandise trains would terminate off the Southern Transcon or need to be repowered before continuing north.  And finally in Chicago, many intermodal trains would terminate – mostly from California, but power would need to be relayed if running through to other railroads which weren’t on the “Buffalo” or “Pittsburgh” routes.

I could go on, but the point is obvious:  Captive power only works when most of the trains go most of the distance of where the power is captive.  Otherwise, it creates a huge inefficiency that supersedes any perceived benefits.  The amount of locomotive dwell, train delay, and repositioning power to accommodate or to overcome the electrified section would not only be huge, it would be perpetual.

In today’s railroading, power modifications add cost and train delay.  This cost is easily recoverable if power is simply added for a section with increased grade, but to modify power just to change from diesel-electric to electric or vice versa (and back as the case may be) – especially with a large number of trains – is so cost prohibitive, it will never happen.  Clearly, a predominately all-electric system would be required to match the efficiency of much of today’s railroading (locomotive power from origin to destination, even through interchange).