Canadians derailed a train and drove it to City Hall for power after a ice storm
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
Open the article: "Over the week spanning Jan. 4-10, 1998..."
That was honestly a wild time. I was almost 12. School was closed for 2-3 weeks because they couldn't promise there would be electricity to heat the building. The ice kept breaking power lines or crushing the transmission towers from the weight (ice is heavy!). Imagine your car, covered in a 1-2 inch thick layer of very solid ice, encased.
People died. The military had to come in to help. My family was fortunate that we had a wood stove in the basement that kept the house warm and cooked some meals on. We lost power a few hours at least every day.
Crazy time.
Edit: For those interested in this, the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ic...) has some great photos and description. 1,000 transmission towers/pylons destroyed, 35,000 utility poles. Whole forests devastated.
We were lucky that we were on a road designated as an emergency route, and though power was down, our internet still worked.
My dad was handy so he set me up on my laptop with a car battery, and my life as a shy, hypersensitive, introvert who found solace being away from people and on my computer - learning to code through adding features and a fixed ASCII interface for the text-based MUD I was building - debugging as I went, using my mother's university account server to host it initially; he also brought in a BBQ and heated the house with propane - not recommended as you need to know the cautions.
Photos: https://www.google.com/search?q=1998+ice+storm+canada
Winchester was an Ontario Hydro hub, so I was only without power for about a day and a half (we had a wood stove, too). So this nerd had internet and video games. The only "tough" job I had to do was help my grandfather clear his driveway of the thick ice, which took hours (salt was impossible to come by at this point).
It was pre-911 before emergency response was well funded which made things more challenging. They were dealing with frozen everything, no power, no cellular, impassable roads, etc.
Sure that costs, but it saves your butt in times like these.
I remember walking over huge snowbanks on our front yard and it was all frozen solid. We could almost walk straight up onto the house roof.
I don't think this is exactly right. I'm sure it wasn't consistent either, but few loads really cared too much.
From the article's link, about a different locomotive doing the same thing:
> Conrail actually had a set of standing instructions on how to provide quasi-commercial power from a locomotive. For an SD40-2, you attach to the bus before the diodes. Operating in notch 6 runs the generator at 647 RPM. Since the AR10 is a 10 pole machine, that gives 64.7 Hz power. You could tweak the governor to get it closer to 60 Hz if you really wanted to, but for powering everything but clocks, it's close enough. I think the method for regulating the voltage was to disconnect the load regulator from it's governor-powered vane motor and dialing the voltage in manually. The output is 3 phase power. Max output in notch 6 is about 1000KW. If the avg home draws 2-3 KW on the avg, that'd power several hundred homes.
Most power generating units operate at a relatively fixed rpm for longevity and will ramp a little during heavy load.
Source: https://www.generatorsource.com/Generator_Frequency_Conversi...
Also pulled up an old spec sheet for a Cummins and it had the same rpm/Hz specs.
Link to PDF: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
Edit: added link to spec sheet
A diesel locomotive's engine controls are about producing the right amount of power to match the operator's throttle control. Electrical frequency at the generator (alternator) terminals is irrelevant since that output is being rectified to DC anyways. This is great for a train, because it means you can have full power at any speed - the speed of your train and the speed of your engine are completely decoupled from each other. But if you now connect this normally variable frequency AC output directly to 60 Hz loads, you will need to figure out how to set the throttle to best maintain something close to 60 Hz and your power output will be limited.
There may be minimum quantities in your engine order, though the contract will provide for spare parts which might get you a single replacement many years after the generator is manufactured (if the rest of the engine is still available)
The larger the generator, the more likely you have a constant-RPM setup.
Inverter generators can also sell power back to the grid. To pay for the fuel you need more than the typical retail price of electric, so this is only worth it if you have a need for a backup generator anyway. However if you have this need talk to the power company, they often will give you a discount because when there are load issues (See Texas last week), and the ability to add power to the grid in this time will be something they are interested in.
Today most large generators are still constant RPM, but I don't expect that to last.
Also, you can run them in parallel without problems, as long as you keep the governors from oscillating. But proper PID tuning and sensing architecture should turn that into a non-issue.
Larger engines btw. just disable cylinders for part-load operation.
Cylinder disabling has a place too.
One of the reasons old stationary engines (in Europe) in the pre-governator time ran at a fixed speed of 1500 RPMs
Maybe something got lost in translation and "specific, constant RPM" was describing (a feedback loop of) "watch the frequency and keep it steady" as opposed to "always use this value"?
--
Also, wow. Seriously, wow. A locomotive running flat out could power several hundred homes. Transportation is expensive, both from a relative cost perspective, and also from a resource(-wastefulness) perspective. Electric (specifically grid-connected) trains also suddenly make a bit more sense.
It really isn't. That locomotive running flat out may use a lot of energy. But it's also moving an enormous amount of freight, making the energy used per unit mass fairly small. For instance, CSX estimates it can move about 1 ton of freight 492 miles per gallon of diesel: https://www.csx.com/index.cfm/about-us/the-csx-advantage/fue...
Your trip to the store and back will probably use more energy.
A passenger car should get 20-30 miles (30-50 km) per gallon, so unless your store run is several towns over (or you're in the sticks), probably less energy moving a ton 500 miles by rail. Though yes, personal autos are, relative to size and cargo capacity, profligate energy users.
So in the end it mostly works out.
2. If you can't get it up, you won't be going down.
A 110 car unit coal train grosses 143 tons per car for a 15,750 ton gross trainset weight, excluding locos. Metric is nearly the same, I'll round to 15,000 tonne.
Lifting that 1,000 metres (3,300 feet) requires about 150 gigajoules of energy, or the energy equivalent of over 3.5 tonnes of oil. You're not going to recover that fuel going downhill.
(Rough numbers for an approximate answer, but it's a lot of energy.)
The highest elevation mainline crossing in the US was on the Union Pacific Railroad, Tennessee Pass (10,240 feet, 3,121 m), built in 1882 and retired in 1997. Today it's the San Luis & Rio Grande Railroad, La Veta Pass (9,242 feet, 2,816 metres).
https://www.railserve.com/stats_records/highest_steepest_rai...
3.5 tons of fuel for 15 000 tons is 230g of fuel per ton, or around a tenth of a gallon per ton.
So even on the highest climb, assuming none of the energy is used on the downhill, that's 3 tenths of a gallon per fuel per ton for the climb.
For context, a car's engine could move the average car 5.4 miles on flat ground with the energy required for a locomotive to lift the same car up 3km.
As you can see, it's really not that much energy. Which is why regenerative braking isn't used.
Some high speed passenger trains do actually do this, FYI.
Started around 20 years ago.
Which is my entire point.
Now a freight train will run at, I don't know, 120 km/h? So, theoretically, it could run 2 880 km in a day. As we can see, that's a lot less than the combined 168 000 km 2400 hybrid cars could drive.
So if we're comparing a train pulled by a locomotive like this to single-occupant hybrid electric cars, the train would have to transport 60 people to be about equivalent in efficiency. That seems very doable, you could fit that in a single train car. Also the 1000 kW power output is the peak output, I can't imagine a locomotive would be anywhere near it's max power very often.
Did I goof in my calculations? I may well have! But based on these numbers, trains seem pretty efficient.
Also, looks like your car gets ~230Wh / mile, that’s pretty efficient compared to teslas, what kind of EV do you have? Are teslas just that inefficient or are you including ICE hybrid engine use in that measurement? Model 3 gets ~315 - 350 Wh / mile
Trains are similar to solar panels... they are operationally super efficient but require a large capital investment. Where they work, they are magic.
Electric infrastructure is even more capital intensive, i would guess that if using was even marginally more efficient, it would have been implemented as railroads benefit from that efficiency. Equipment exists to accept grid power in diesel (Amtrak trains pulling into Penn station in NYC switch).
- flexibility and independence of power source. Switzerland can use hydropower, France can use nuclear power, many places could use coal power and not worry about losing rail transport in an oil shortage.
- reduced maintenance costs (no diesel engines; reduced weight of the trains causes less wear on the track)
- more power, i.e. faster trains, increasing the capacity of the railway line. Passengers approve, and freight trains can accelerate better meaning it's easier to run them between passenger trains.
The US and Canada have less to gain with these than many other countries.
That's exactly what happened in my hometown, which generated power via a locomotive that was literally up on blocks. You could hear it grinding away from quite a distance. They only got connected to the grid when I was in my 20s and long gone.
On a first glance it would appear so, but it a terrible idea in practice. At least for freight. Commuter trains are often electric (15 Hz? I forget), mostly for local air quality problems.
Train engines are incredibly efficient. Only the largest marine engines are better. These engines are large enough that they approach the thermal efficiency of the thermal plant producing electricity.
So no real gains for CO2 emissions. (Wind and solar don’t count at a first approx. since we’re talking about marginal E use. The train not connected on to the grid frees up production at a thermal plant to lower its production)
But you also loose a lot of resiliency. In extremis, a diesel Trains don’t need anything to run. In case of an ice storm you have to rebuild big infrastructure. Train can help you transport that if they’re independent.
And, as far as I know, all major high speed trains are electric.
All locomotives use electric motors for traction. Diesel locomotives have a motor that turns a generator to produce electricity for the traction motors on the wheels. A diesel locomotive can stop and start just as fast as a fully electric locomotive, but commuter trains are relatively lighter than freight trains. Diesel locomotives can also use regenerative braking.
The Caltrain electrification plan respectfully disagrees. I am not remotely an expert, but I would guess there are two major factors at play. First, a lot of commuter electric trains are multiple units and have no locomotive. This means that more of the wheels can supply traction, which presumably increases the traction-to-weight ratio of the whole train set. Secondly, I think that efficient diesel generators tend to be most efficient at a specific output power, whereas a commuter train runs over a wide range of output powers. A grid-powered electric train set can briefly draw several MW from the grid without a major loss of efficiency.
Commuter trains usually use multiple units, and metro trains always do -- they start and stop often, so the improved acceleration is a benefit.
Long distance trains can be multiple units, or a single locomotive: the time saving is less useful on a train that stops infrequently, so lower capital + maintenance costs win (plus passenger comfort, it's quieter inside).
A pair of TGV power cars, one at each end of the train, has a max power of 12MW at full acceleration, you would need about 14 of these diesel locos for the same output.
The power here is 25kV at 50Hz apart from some commuter lines. Also modern electric trains can use regenerative braking to dump the braking energy back into the grid. It’s pretty common.
14 diesel locomotives sounds like a lot, but that is absolute maximum power, and a TGV carries a ton of people. On routes where they are very inefficient (London-Paris as an example), you're looking at around 10 times more emissions by plane (plane 122kg vs high speed train 11kg.) On routes where they are efficient, you're looking at more around 100x more emissions by plane (65kg Paris to Lyon by plane vs 0.7kg by TGV.)
Data here:
https://ressources.data.sncf.com/explore/dataset/emission-co...
You'll notice that you can cross the whole of France, 1001km Lille-Marseille, for just about 1.6 kilograms CO2 per person per trip. Try that in a plane!
There’s some room for error, but frequency is the a very important metric for the utility to get right. The reason is that motors start to burn when the frequency is significantly off of the design f [1].
So, the blower in your furnace will die (-> no heat in the home). Your laundry machines’ motor burn. You ovens convection oven burns. Etc.
You’re better of with rolling black ours (Texas forgot the “rolling” part) than get the frequency wrong.
[1] think of a motor as an LCR circuit. There’s a natural f, and if youre far from it it will cause heating of the windings
Modern laundry machines have sophisticated power electronics between mains and drum motor.
This part doesn't quite make sense though, because it mixes RPM (per-minute) with Hz (per-second) without scaling.
647 RPM is 10.8 Hz, and more poles should increase the frequency not decrease it - 10 poles means you'd multiply it by 5, so would give you 54 Hz.
Alternating phases would be hooked up to one phase or the other, with negative phase poles connected backwards. I know traction motors are brushed, so probably the generators are as well. If that's the case then you should be able to just bolt new wires on (brushes are consumables, so they are easily replaceable).
edit: managed to misread your conclusion as it would be 110 Hz, lol.
CN is not a "Canadian Amtrak" or even an Amtrak competitor. It's a publicly-traded freight rail company that doesn't currently operate passenger service. The US obviously has analogs: Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, etc.
Like Amtrak, VIA is a federal government-owned operator of intercity passenger rail services. And just like Amtrak, it operates mostly on tracks owned by private freight railways such as CN.
> Unfortunately, though, the closest thing the U.S. has to a national rail provider like CN is the chronically under-funded Amtrak
One funny thing is the Canadian CN is..CN. It has extensive operations in the US
> Big business, after all, should be expected to put its interests first, no matter the cost to the public, be that a delayed train or weeks-long power outages in the dead of winter.
If CN is a business, kudos to them for contributing to the civic good during a time of crisis, unlike so many American corporations.
Such as the United States Federal Government under the current administration?
> Unfortunately, though, the closest thing the U.S. has to a national rail provider like CN is the chronically under-funded Amtrak
I quoted "Canadian Amtrak" as an expression of my own making, not one from the article.
The article is saying Amtrak, a half baked VIA, is the closest thing they, in Texas, have to CN. That's not saying CN is close to Amtrak.
If my buddy has a Humvee and I say, "Unfortunately, the closest thing I have is a Schwinn", I'm not saying their Humvee is a bicycle.
Quotes are commonly used to mark a specific novel phrase. I was not intending to imply that it was a phrase from the article.
> The article is saying Amtrak, a half baked VIA, is the closest thing they, in Texas, have to CN.
I disagree with the interpretation, and this claim is still wrong.
First of all, the part I quoted makes a statement about the US, not just Texas. I realize that the previous sentence mentions Texas, but this sentence is clearly naming the country as a whole.
Second, if the article is saying that, this claim would also be incorrect. There are actual rail providers that own significant amounts of railway in Texas, and Amtrak (like VIA Rail) is not one of them.
Here's a decent map: https://www.intekfreight-logistics.com/intermodal-network-ma...
> If my buddy has a Humvee and I say, "Unfortunately, the closest thing I have is a Schwinn", I'm not saying their Humvee is a bicycle.
Yes. Unfortunately for the author, the US has multiple Humvee equivalents depending on the region, so saying that the "closest thing I have is a Schwinn" is just false when Union Pacific (among others) exists in Texas and is in the same market as Canadian National.
Yes: Update: Feb. 23, 10:12 a.m. ET: An erroneous reference to CN as a national rail provider has been removed, the railway having been publicly traded since 1995.
The thing is that Lexington was very unusual for an American ship in having turboelectric propulsion, where the steam turbines were connected to generators which produced power for the electric motors which turned the propellers. Most US Navy steamships- including all of the modern nuclear-powered ones- use a mechanical transmission to connect their steam turbines to the propellers directly. They do run some generators from the turbines for so-called 'hotel load'- operating the ship's electrical systems- but the output of these is relatively limited.
Some other countries' nuclear submarines do have turboelectric propulsion- I think the Russians have used submarines to power isolated Siberian cities in emergencies- and the USN's new Columbia-class SSBNs will. But the amount of electricity you could get from any current US Navy ship would be limited.
The US tried building turboelectric submarines twice, but in both cases they were heavier and slower than equivalents powered by geared turbines. Apparently advances in electric motor/generator technology in recent years have reached the point where it's practical again.
I'm not sure you'd be able to float that down in poor weather, however.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RV_Mirai
And had to be converted to running on fossil fuels.
> She had covered 250,000 nautical miles (463,000 km) on 22 kilograms of uranium.
So each cylinder displaces ~11 liters. I know there's bigger out there, but that's big to me.
is pretty impressive stuff and this one:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachinePorn/comments/mfjdz/this_is_...
Is nothing short of amazing, there are some pictures with engineers going down into the cylinders with stepladders... 1800 liters / cylinder displacement.
In fact, I believe for a lot of engines, the mechanical energy rarely is used directly to power wheels -- it usually (for diesel-electric, for example) is powering a generator that then is feeding electricity to motors + wheels.
So, maybe not such a stretch to take the power/electricity off to other purposes?
The power generation is fundamentally the same as in marine purposes, too. In fact, the modern engines such as the EMD 710 or GE 7FDL, often come in non-mobile stationary/marine operation configurations for these purposes.
The whole point is to use the alternator + electric motors as a CVT basically. You want the engine to be able to use it's maximum power at any given speed. The amount of gears you'd need for a mechanical transmission for the big freight locomotives would be absurd.
Diesel-hydraulic was also tried for a while but was largely unsuccessful. For special applications, like maintenance equipment or moving things in a railyard, you can still find some diesel-mechanical and diesel-hydraulic equipment.
If a freight train stops, depending on its length, it must reverse to add slack between cars. Then it starts by effectively pulling each car one by one. You can hear it as a bang-bang-bang if you're nearby, depending on the coupling method between cars. If a train loses momentum on a hill, it may have to reverse and start from the bottom.
Noisy, but effective.
Unfortunately you aren't going to load that onto a truck so that would be a straight gas turbine which is great for power to weight, cost and reliability but not efficiency.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a snow blower was using the jet turbines more for its blow ability than its heat ability.
[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/Abgasloe... [1]: (There doesn't seem to be a comparable en site, but images and machine translation work): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerosoll%C3%B6schfahrzeug
It seems like a diesel train or jet engine would be even worse for the environment, per kWh, and even less likely to get federal approval.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2021/02/f82/DOE%2020...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mulligan_and_His_Steam_Sh...
These days they're basically rolling generators (powering electric motors and using their sheer mass for traction).
"Iron horse" is an iconic literary term (currently transitioning into an archaic reference) for a steam locomotive, originating in the early 1800s when horses still powered most machinery, excepting windmills and stationary steam engines. The term was common and popular in both British and North American literary articles.
I assume that just putting miles of cable along the track is more cost-effective, but it can't be used everywhere.
https://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2021/01/04-wabtecs-flx...
Miles of cable along the track is something the big railroads have looked at. If fuel goes to (and stays at) $8/gallon they will do it. Right now it isn't worth it, but the costs are easy to analyses.
The above is for freight rail. For passenger rail electric lines work out different, no serious operator of passenger rail uses anything else. Tourist attractions (generally running steam) are not serious. Diesel engines can be a useful backup for when wires break. Diesel is also useful on marginal lines that are only run at all because they already exist, but you would never build. Everything else - probably the majority - is incompetence.
In reality, this doesn't happen -- the capital cost of idle diesel locomotives would negate (and more) the money saved with the electric trains.
If catenary is damaged in Europe (usually by storms), rail services are suspended until it's repaired. Repair is a very high priority.
(For one thing, it's unlikely to be safe to repair the catenary if trains are still running.)
https://www.toshiba.co.jp/infrastructure/en/topics/back-numb...
https://www.raildeliverygroup.com/about-us/publications/acop... §6.1.4 says the UK rail network "never" lost power supply up to 2017, but...
Two years ago, a 45 minute cut to railway power in South East England led to a £10 million fine to the power companies: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/03/three-energ...
The PDF also points out that a diesel backup is generally useless, since the line is blocked by the stuck electric trains.
The alternator and transformer don't care about the lower voltage, except that their current capability won't change much (so you loose power capability).
So I'd assume they should be able to use existing power lines from the other side of the overpass to the school, possibly after isolating that segment from the rest of the grid.
This might also connect some other buildings, but typical transformer ratings here (DE, urban, residential; are a few hundred kVA. So
(If you don't know what kVA means, "kW felt by wires/ transformer/generator, but not the diesel" is a rough summary sufficient for this scenario.
(Don't worry, it's neither wrong nor misleading. If you disagree with that statement, elaborate and feel free to downvote.))
It's especially absurd here, because CN has been privatized since 1995, and the incident happened in 1998.
https://worthly.com/business/five-biggest-railroad-companies...
Texas has lost power due a snow storm, like Boucherville, but has no CN to ask for help.
The link is set up in paragraph six. I think you can google for details about what is happening in Texas, it might have made the news.
Next time this thing happen no need to derail a train just get an EV or a PHEV that can be a handy as a mobile and powerful power generator. For PHEV you can even use petrol or diesel to generate the electricity.
They may have "simply" modified the generators exciting field strength. If so, these generators once were designed with ample allowance.
Heating is the largest energy expense in most homes, accounting for 35-50 percent of annual energy bills in colder parts of the country.
Home air conditioning accounts for almost 6 percent of all the electricity produced in the U.S.
https://www.c2es.org/content/home-energy-use/
As of Feb. 17, energy was out for 2.7 million households, officials said. With freezing temperatures expected through the weekend, getting the lights back on will be a slow process, as the state has lost 40% of its generating capacity, with natural gas wells and pipelines, along with wind turbines, frozen shut.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-texas-wind-turb...
So extremely quick and dirty: If we moved to passive solar, we could potentially save as much as 10 percent of energy usage and it would be the part that's really critical in a crisis induced by an extreme weather event: The lifesaving ability to stay warm without power.
With climate change making extreme weather events more common, promoting passive solar ought to be a policy around the world. It also helps disrupt that positive feedback loop that we run the AC more because of climate change and running the AC more helps promote climate change.
The ideal solution is a ground-source heat pump, where a closed loop is buried underground to take advantage of the very stable and reasonable subsurface ground temperature.
If you can afford to put in a geothermal ground loop and use a heat pump, you can have a very stable heating and cooling solution that is energy efficient and works well in a super-insulated passive home.
Everyone loves to pick on air conditioning, but the recent disaster has shown that heating is also a huge problem. As your statistics show, heating can consume more energy than air conditioning depending on the region. AC only needs to lower the indoor temperature by 10-20F, whereas heating requirements can exceed 50F. This makes it a much harder problem to reliably produce the amount of energy needed to keep people from freezing.
Climate change can bring not only hotter summers but also colder winters and more energetic storms. We desperately need methods to generate clean energy even during extreme weather. Especially during extreme weather.
I am not talking about solar power generation. Quite the contrary.
Passive solar is about building design and orientation. One of the techniques it uses is thermal mass.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
Though generally one gets to a point of diminishing returns. It's probably better to get to a certain efficiency point, and then throw some solar/PV panels on the roof and become 'net zero', producing the electricity you need on-site:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_building
Residentially, you can built a 5000 square foot (500 sq. m) home that needs only 1500W (1.5 kW)—basically a hair dyer—to heat/cool:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vul4vMFdkA
Using an HRV/ERV with an air filter per ASHRAE 62.1 and 62.2 gives you very good air quality.
When it was actually a smart mayor requisitioning a train locomotive to use it's engines to produce electricity for municipal buildings.
I wonder what it all cost in the end.
Local asphalt repair is also pretty routine for replacing pipes and stuff. I too wonder what it cost but I bet it's surprisingly little.
See this: https://www.mtlblog.com/en-ca/news/crazy-montreal-map-showin...
I'm sure this engine has been optimized for different factors, and it's likely a fairly old locomotive, but that's about 14hp/litre which seems pretty inefficient. Modern diesel cars can usually get >60hp/litre.
The engines are designed for running at peak power for a long time, which a car engine cannot do. They run at a low rpm and last 30 years; millions and millions of miles. They run on low quality fuel. There's basically no weight constraint, in fact locomotives are required to be really heavy for the sake of wheel friction.
Finally, most power is needed at startup, not for maintaining speed. One locomotive can't actually pull an entire fully loaded train from zero. There is slack between each car, and they are accelerated from zero one by one, from front to rear of the train.
The engineers could get 10x more horsepower out of that engine, but the customers don't want that because the engine wouldn't last as long and so it isn't cost effective overall.
https://www.nscale.net/forums/showthread.php?26818-Could-an-...
Or a person can start a single rail vehicle moving using a lever under a wheel, by hand:
https://www.aldonco.com/store/p/198-Manual-Car-Mover-with-gu...
Using one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W8c_jMVYAs
Such big engines runs at low RPM, below 1000 (I have not looked at this particular model). It's common for boats to run at 500.
In comparison, my 2.2 liters 2007 diesel mercedes runs at around 2400 RPM at cruising speed of 65mph, which is its max torque. Max HP (150) is achieved at 3500 RPM. It's by no mean a sporty car but it's low RPM torque allows to pull the horse van easily.
The freight carrier boats can feature impressive diesel engines, of thousands of liters, producing millions of Nm of torque, hundred of thousands of HP, at ~100RPM.
For some cultural reasons, American muscle cars featured big relatively slow but torquey engines compared to their Italian counterparts.