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Post by The Ferro Kid on Sept 20, 2022 10:32:45 GMT -8
Seems like I've heard everything on these. From "constantly sidelined with problems," to RRs buying new ones. Does anybody know what the general status of these are?
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Post by fr8kar on Sept 21, 2022 11:58:33 GMT -8
BNSF put theirs out to pasture in Galveston. Once the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality credits ran out nobody was interested in trying to keep them running anymore. The only use they had after that point was as RCO controlling locomotives, even if they weren't generating any tractive effort. As more RCO controlling locomotives came online the utility of the gensets was greatly diminished.
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Post by lvrr325 on Sept 21, 2022 14:58:43 GMT -8
That may be the only remaining use of them, for environmental credits.
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Post by The Ferro Kid on Sept 22, 2022 1:08:08 GMT -8
Thanks, everyone. Only ones I ever saw in person were US Army units at Fort Carson, from a distance. I heard they were always sidelined with some problem or the other. Last I saw one was maybe 2018, but that was always hit or miss.
I thought from the gitgo that, interesting as the concept was, it had too many moving parts.
I'm skeptical of all the new hydrogen animals as well. But, you can't move forward without trying things. What is amusing though, is there's always a super optimistic hue & cry when the new concept first comes out, then silence as time goes by and it isn't working.
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Post by Baikal on Sept 22, 2022 7:05:18 GMT -8
For multiple reasons, gensets are in the same catagory as the failed California high speed rail.
Some people made lots of money. But there was no real benefit or need.
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Post by edwardsutorik on Sept 22, 2022 14:34:49 GMT -8
...the failed California high speed rail. It hasn't "failed". It's still failing. I hesitate to guess when the past tense will occur. Ed |
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Post by Baikal on Sept 22, 2022 16:49:30 GMT -8
...the failed California high speed rail. It hasn't "failed". It's still failing. I hesitate to guess when the past tense will occur. Ed
I drove by the oversized overbudget unfinished flyover near Fresno on Tuesday.
Reasonable facsimile:
Graffiti all over, rusted metal, tumbleweeds. No one working. Best was the busted 2' x 4" construction handrail 100 ft in the air.
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Post by kentuckysouthernrwy on Sept 26, 2022 5:11:07 GMT -8
Used to see CSX 1301 in road trains between Wyoming Yard, Grand Rapids, and Plymouth, usually tacked on behind regular road power. Never knew if it was assigned to Wyoming or Plymouth but guessed it was being shipped out for service to the opposite entity. Never saw it working. It appeared the genset concept was for government incentives of some sort. Another time I saw one of the 130x units in the consist of a train in Fostoria.
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Post by wjstix on Jan 24, 2023 6:51:24 GMT -8
The most recent Virtual Railfan "Grab Bag" video shows some BNSF Genset and GE engines apparently on their way to be scrapped. Starts at 16:20. |
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Post by fr8kar on Jan 24, 2023 10:24:13 GMT -8
I can't help but feel a little nostalgic for those gensets. Most of the time they were a nightmare, but on the rare occasions they worked they weren't so bad at spotting industries or switching small cuts of cars. The version 2 with dynamics was better, but I would have liked to see version 3.
I had that CN oil train (at 1:35) last week when it was a load. It was a nice change to have locomotives with 6 traction motors for a change. Microwave and tea kettle are a nice touch, too.
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Post by hudsonyard on Jan 27, 2023 23:51:13 GMT -8
local rail terminal operation has one thats built from the frame/guts of an ex-SP geep, a few months back they had to take it out onto the LIRR main to rescue a new york and atlantic train that had derailed, it was my first real time seeing the thing up close as it's usually buried deep in the facility. ugly goddamn thing.
as a side note, i would have loved to have seen the paperwork from that move, a non PTC equipped locomotive entering manual block 251 territory in the same direction as a train that's already occupying the block, the dispatcher, block operator and conductor all must've written a copy of ulysses for that one!
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Post by Colin 't Hart on Jan 30, 2023 6:36:46 GMT -8
I can't help but feel a little nostalgic for those gensets. Most of the time they were a nightmare, but on the rare occasions they worked they weren't so bad at spotting industries or switching small cuts of cars. The version 2 with dynamics was better, but I would have liked to see version 3. I'd be surprised if we've heard the last of gensets or hybrid locomotives. The technology has been very succesful for Toyota in motor vehicles. But the premise of a genset where the generators are relatively low powered seems to be flawed to me; the locomotive (like the passenger vehicle) needs to have a decent power plant to start with. |
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Post by edwardsutorik on Jan 30, 2023 8:52:24 GMT -8
There's a difference between whether a genset has enough "beans", or whether it's hugely unreliable.
Ed
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Post by sd80mac on Jan 31, 2023 11:50:59 GMT -8
I only have experience with CSX's 3GS21Bs and 3GS21B-DEs. The former were pretty worthless for switching, took way too much time to load, worse than a GE. I have to wonder how much money was lost when you look at the amount of fuel "saved" by a Genset compared to all of the extra time it took to do anything with them. The DEs were a little better, but you had better have a pair of them or you were going no where fast. They were usually paired with a Geep whenever I would encounter them.
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Post by edwardsutorik on Jan 31, 2023 15:30:34 GMT -8
It then appears that the gensets have no significant battery storage, because I don't think there'd be a chance for a loading problem if they did. The batteries would have you moving RIGHT NOW. And the gens could catch up later.
It does seem that whoever designed these things didn't bother to get (or ignored) the opinions of people who would use them.
Ed
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Post by sd80mac on Jan 31, 2023 15:41:59 GMT -8
It does seem that whoever designed these things didn't bother to get (or ignored) the opinions of people who would use them. Ed You just described every aspect of railroading. |
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Post by edwardsutorik on Jan 31, 2023 17:46:50 GMT -8
I s'pose. Really stupid!
So weird when management doesn't realize that their job is to help the workers do their job better. As a stockholder, that'd make me happy. And richer.
Ed
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Post by cemr5396 on Jan 31, 2023 18:45:52 GMT -8
I s'pose. Really stupid! So weird when management doesn't realize that their job is to help the workers do their job better. As a stockholder, that'd make me happy. And richer. Ed that would require being able to see past the end of their own nose. It's all about what makes them money right now. Not 5 minutes from now, not 5 months from now, and certainly not 5 years from now. In many (but maybe not all) cases Gensets were funded by local governments. In which case of course the railroads gladly accepted them - they were basically free. Who cares if it works if it's free? |
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Post by fr8kar on Jan 31, 2023 22:06:05 GMT -8
I s'pose. Really stupid! So weird when management doesn't realize that their job is to help the workers do their job better. As a stockholder, that'd make me happy. And richer. Ed that would require being able to see past the end of their own nose. It's all about what makes them money right now. Not 5 minutes from now, not 5 months from now, and certainly not 5 years from now. In many (but maybe not all) cases Gensets were funded by local governments. In which case of course the railroads gladly accepted them - they were basically free. Who cares if it works if it's free? Bingo! And in the case of the TCEQ they wanted some accountability demonstrating the locomotives were being used. So it didn't take long for the local management tasked with ensuring these locomotives racked up the required credits to put them in roles where they would accumulate hours of continuous use instead of sporadic hours spent switching. Most trainmasters - hell, most railroad employees - aren't railfans nor do they really care much about the equipment, so at a certain point these locomotives were measured like any other, by their availability and horsepower. In our case the gensets were regularly used on heavy transfer drags which is definitely not the optimum use of the design. One consequence of that constant heavy abuse was rapidly recurring failure. At first we had a handful of gensets that were RC equipped and those spent time on specific RCO jobs which tended to handle smaller cuts of cars and operated on fairly level ground. Unsurprisingly those gensets had a much lower failure rate, but eventually they would fail. And so it became common to see a dead genset as the RC brains controlling a smoke-belching consist of geeps or SDs kicking cuts of cars into the bowl tracks. It certainly did not make a good impression as these consists would grind along the lead passing by the division GM's office window all day. By the time the maintenance contract ran out on these locomotives our mechanical forces were getting a handle on how to deal with the gensets. To a certain extent they got them to behave as long as they weren't abused. But oblivious trainmasters continued to assign them to roles where failure was guaranteed. At a certain point the credits from the state ran out and management's patience with the gensets also ran out around the same time. Almost all of them were parked in the following months with a few stragglers finally joining the dead line of other locomotives too expensive to repair. And not long after that the maintenance base was shut down and the employees furloughed or left to exercise their seniority somewhere else. |
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Post by edwardsutorik on Feb 1, 2023 6:37:39 GMT -8
I am surprised that these gensets didn't have some sort of protection that would shut them down before they were damaged by being overloaded--some sort of "push to re-set" button. Could even include data recording, so you'd know when it happened so you could find out the cause.
Ed
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Post by fr8kar on Feb 10, 2023 13:18:07 GMT -8
I am surprised that these gensets didn't have some sort of protection that would shut them down before they were damaged by being overloaded--some sort of "push to re-set" button. Could even include data recording, so you'd know when it happened so you could find out the cause. Ed I forget the name of the device that would fail most often, but I believe it was a coupler of some kind. If I remember my conversations with the mechanical folks who had to deal with these things, this was the link between the individual generator sets and the generator/alternator that powers the traction motors. There was a hard clunk when it would break and you'd get no effort from the locomotive after that. In order to repair the locomotive at that point the forward generator set would have to be removed which was accomplished by a crane. Since our "roundhouse" didn't have an overhead crane this work had to be hired out. After paying for that a couple times I think they figured out that it was best to hire the crane when they had multiple locomotives to work on, especially when the crane could pull a generator set from a bad order locomotive and install a repaired generator set into another one on the same day. At least as often as that catastrophic failure there would be a different type of failure, especially of just one of the generator sets on the locomotive. This could be mechanical or electrical, but the end result was that the affected genset locomotive would only generate marginal effort. The display screen would report that the locomotive was in "LIMP-IN MODE" and tractive effort would be markedly reduced. Mechanical's answer to this was to instruct us to drop the breakers and pull the knife switch for a few moments and that would reset all but the most stubborn of computer errors, but as you might imagine it would do nothing for mechanical problems. Part of the problem with these locomotives was there seemed to be no documentation on them, at least as far as TY&E was concerned. Our mechanical rule books would describe the troubleshooting process for locomotives that were essentially gone from the property like Dash 8s and SW1000s but the genset locomotives didn't exist as far as the book was concerned. There were some operational quirks specific to these locomotives that often led to failures. For example, it was understood that these locomotives would generate effort relative to the effort required. In other words if only a few cars were being handled, there was no need for more than one of the generator sets to fire up. If the load was heavier another one or both of the other generator sets should come online to meet the effort needed. Unfortunately this process was rarely automatic and often an engineer or RCO switchman would move the throttle toward notch 8 and expect more effort while only one generator set was running. If the locomotive did not bring one or more additional generator sets online then it would overload and fail. I learned after some time that there was a process to bringing two or three generator sets online before attempting to move the train and once I used that method I could get the locomotive to handle the weight, assuming all the individual generator sets were functioning properly. But this method was not communicated to us in any official capacity and I never heard another engineer use it. Only after working the hostler job and talking to mechanical about the repeated failures did I learn what to do. Another opportunity for failure was a seemingly insignificant configuration that was required to get the locomotives to operate properly. In any locomotive consist only the controlling locomotive should have the engine control, fuel pump and generator field switches in the on position. The engine control and fuel pump switches can be on in trailing locomotives, but not the generator field switch, so it was common when walking through a consist to check the position of these switches and manipulate them accordingly. The problem with these gensets was that one of them in any consist must have the generator field switch in the on position for it and the other genset locomotives in the consist to generate any effort. That was obviously not a problem when a genset was the controlling locomotive, but if you had a standard locomotive as the controlling unit and one or more genset locomotives as trailing units and none of the generator field switches was in the on position in one of those locomotives then none of them would generate any effort. This would overload any remaining units in the consist and occasionally result in failures but most often would just mean the consist was exceedingly slow. As far as I could tell there was no official documentation instructing us to close the generator field switch on any genset locomotive in the consist so this was a recurring problem, especially since this ran counter to the instructions in our air brake and train handling rules. I never met a train master or yardmaster who knew the solution to this problem, so when a consist with genset locomotives was discovered to be operating poorly because the genset locomotives weren't loading up, only minimal effort was used to troubleshoot the consist before instructing the crew to switch with smaller cuts or to rearrange the consist since it was unlikely the crew would discover the solution of closing the generator field switch on a trailing locomotive. Our proximity to the glass palace at times gives us a revolving door of managers, so that coupled with the myth that any time an engineer's or switchman's lips are moving the lies coming out are crafted to get out of work or make more money meant that any of my complaints or suggestions were immediately ignored by all but a handful of trainmasters who knew me well. You can only get chewed out or threatened so many times before you give up offering help. Still, the easiest thing to do was to keep them working, so that's what I did. Any affection I have for them comes from that place. |
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Post by edwardsutorik on Feb 10, 2023 15:21:31 GMT -8
Thanks, Ryan.
A very nice read, for sure.
Ed
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Post by Baikal on Feb 10, 2023 23:00:51 GMT -8
I am surprised that these gensets didn't have some sort of protection that would shut them down before they were damaged by being overloaded--some sort of "push to re-set" button. Could even include data recording, so you'd know when it happened so you could find out the cause. Ed I forget the name of the device that would fail most often...
The gensets were political locomotives. Solutions to non-existant problems. Fake, media-forward, with little thought about results. A wokeamotive, a Grettamobile.
Once the $ale was made and the pols & consultants & contractors squeezed alll the publicity out of them, they were just an annoyance to be discarded.
No manuals sounds like they were intended to fail.
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Post by edwardsutorik on Feb 11, 2023 6:26:09 GMT -8
A "wokamotive"! I like it.
In contrast, there was EMC. Unfortunately, I can't come up with a source; but my recollection is that, in the early days, EMC placed a freshly-produced engineer in each new road locomotive (FT?) whose job it was to keep the damn engines going.
THAT'S commitment to the product. Well, that and actually trying to fix whatever the engineers did a temp-fix on.
Ed
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