Tertiary Source

Rail fuel economy

2008-12-05 01:04:24

Dylan Foley pointed out to me that my question about CSX's advertised fuel efficiency has previously gotten attention from FactCheck.org.

The advertised figure of 400-ish ton-miles per gallon of diesel apparently comes in a straightforward way from a rail-industry-wide report assembled by the federal government. Some random forum person estimates that a forty-ton tractor-trailer gets four miles per diesel gallon, about half the fuel efficiency of a train.

Neither of these figures includes the cost of adding or maintaining infrastructure. From a freight-only perspective, which costs less to build and maintain, rails or highways? The mixed uses of highways add a lot of value, too. I'd like to do this estimate more carefully. This sort of omission always reminds me of a comment I heard from David Goodstein while he was promoting his book Out of Gas: that no photovoltaic cell, if you account for the energy required to produce doped perfect silicon crystals, has ever extracted more solar energy than was required for its construction.

Interesting that the rail-versus-truck "debate" summarized at FactCheck focuses on short-term differences in fuel efficiency, like a regulation prohibiting trucks from burning sulfured diesel which will not apply to trains until 2012. Does that suggest that (these) industry folks don't expect the present public interest in environmentalism to last long enough to impact infrastructure-scale planning?

Comment on Rail fuel economy
Name:
Email:
URL:
(I promise not to do anything unsavory with your contact information.)
You can also send regular email.

Recent questions

[none]

Older questions

In a letter to Physics Today Roger Musson writes that the terms "Stone Age," "Iron Age," etc. refer to the material used most commonly to construct knives. This means we are currently in the Stainless Steel Age, possibly changing to the Plastic Age. By some reasonable measure, when would the transition happen?
2009-05-28 Thursday 17:37:37
Venoms have evolved independently in several different vertebrate lineages: in snakes and lizards, and in the platypus, and in one other mammal. What are the transitional stages for venom to appear? How would the appearance go in, say, a population of people?
2009-04-01 Wednesday 17:41:46
How does the Stephan-Boltzmann constant σ "run" at temperatures where radiation modes other than photons become accessible?
2009-01-31 Saturday 13:34:02
A stopped clock is exactly right twice a day. With some error-weighted averages, a stopped clock is more accurate on average than a clock running, say, ten minutes fast. What averages do and don't have this property?
2008-11-19 Wednesday 23:40:45
Supposedly volcanism on Io is caused (or enhanced) by tidal heating from Jupiter. What power does tidal heating dissipate in the Earth-Moon system?
2008-10-23 Thursday 13:03:59
What makes glassy smooth patches on the surface of a larger body of water? Why are the patches partially stable against rippling from outside?
2008-10-23 Thursday 06:05:41
How strong is the correlation between income tax witholding / refunding and tolerance for government spending?
2008-10-14 Tuesday 23:05:05
What other neat tricks could you pull off using volunteer hardware as a distributed sensor network?
2008-09-30 Tuesday 18:39:26
You can't interact with a physical system without disturbing it, though you can ignore the disturbance in the limit where ħ is small. Similarly, you can't interact with a market for some product (by asking or buying or offering or selling) without affecting the "market price" seen by others, but you can neglect that change unless your exchanges comprise a large fraction of the market. There is some correspondence here. Clearly it'd be easy to take this correspondence as justification for saying some really dumb things. Are there any useful insights there?
2008-09-26 Friday 14:50:23
What's the pressure inside an unopened soda bottle (or can)? What's the rate at which CO2 comes out of solution at ambient pressure? How much does the bubbling change the temperature of the liquid?
2008-09-23 Tuesday 19:19:09