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ChineseDaily Transit Links Roundup
Contributed by Fred Camino on April 22nd, 2008 at 9:13 am
- Celebrate Earth Day with Metro at Union Station! Metro is sponsoring a free concert with Latin singer/songwriter Carina Ricco.
- Get a Carectomy this Earth Day! It’s actually a very painless procedure since a car is not actually neccessary for human survival.
- Attention Metro: Environmentalists are your friends. Identify them, work with them, make them make you look good.
- L.A. takes on San Francisco in the race to be the greenest big city in the state of California.
- Metrolink introduces a new partially electric “green” locomotive just in time for Earth Day.
Discussion
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Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
MetroLink’s new locomotive probably does burn fuel cleaner. But its greener credentials has nothing to do with it being “partially electric”. Every diesel locomotive going back to the earliest ALCOs use its engine to power generators which then move the wheels. Hey guys! That’s why they’re called Diesel-Electrics! Apparently the journalist who rehashed MetroLink’s press release never took Railroad 101.
Haha, regardless of what the engine burns, I’m loving the new locomotive. Metrolink’s aging fleet badly needs some reinforcements and hopefully we’ll see a higher frequency of trains by the end of the year.
Why can’t Metrolink start using full-electric locomotives? Continuing to rely on oil products isn’t the smartest thing to do; there’s an upper limit to how efficient these can be made. There will be a cost in putting up overhead electric lines or a third rail or however a rail line like this is electrified, but it’s better than waiting for oil to get too expensive.
I would think that it’s because they just don’t have enough capital to exchange their entire fleet. Take Metro as an example. They started replacing their diesel buses with clean natural gas around ‘95-’96 and now with the next purchase diesel will finally be phased out in about 2010. It took 15 years to get just buses. Locomotives I imagine are MUCH more expensive, so it will take a long time to get electrification on those lines, especially since much of the lines just plain need to be upgraded to increase capacity.