1955 Union Pacific EMD E9 – The Last of the Classic Diesel Streamliners (2012) | Hacker News Reader

1955 Union Pacific EMD E9 – The Last of the Classic Diesel Streamliners (2012)

curbsideclassic.com

58 pointsLammy71 comments

Diesel locomotives are one of those things where the engine can be well over 50 years old and no one bats an eye since it's just not that unusual nor has the styling changed that much to make it obvious.

These EMD E9's are now used for tourist trains but there's plenty of other diesels pre-dating these that are still just doing their run today. eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa-Sapulpa_Union_Railway is running on diesels from the 1950's, not as a museum piece but just as their expected day to day operations.

It's one of those fun things when you know enough to spot a 70 year old locomotive yet the general sentiment from non-buffs is just that that's perfectly in-line with expectations and not interesting.

> not as a museum piece but just as their expected day to day operations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escanaba_and_Lake_Superior_Rai... run a 1951 FP7A as well. Gorgeous power even when it's pulling freight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMybdRb1EtA

Chicago Metra was running EMD E9 units in daily service into the 1990s.

There was a joke that went "The only thing that holds its resale value better than electronics test equipment is a diesel electric locomotive." I'm not sure how true that is but the commonality is that they can be maintained to do the same job they were designed to do, as well as they did it when they were sold. The only reason they go down in value is because the jobs aren't there for them any more.

Interestingly the evolution of chips has been much harder on "old" test equipment as equivalents can be made one, two, and sometimes three orders of magnitude more cheaply. As a result a "new" thing which has the same capability but usually takes up much less space and power, can do the job of the "old" thing just as well, and then the old thing loses its value.

Eh, they can certainly go down. Newer diesel locos meet more stringent emissions standards and consume less fuel, and the cost of diesel fuel is pretty expensive.

In a way, EMD was a victim of its success; one of their biggest competitors became rebuilt EMD locos. Ultimately, several years after GM unloaded it on a private equity firm, it was sold to Caterpillar-owned Progress Rail, a company that made its name as one such rebuilder.

This speaks more to the lack of technological progress in US rail than anything else.

Foreigners from nations where state of the art HSR is commonplace probably do bat an eye upon seeing such things, in the supposedly modern and progressive USA of all places.

HSR has nothing to do with efficient pulling of freight?

Similar locomotives are the common the world over.

That's fair, I mistakenly apple-and-oranged this one.

US freight locos are different, if only because US rail safety regulations until recently prioritized buff strength whereas European and Japanese regulations do not.

(Buff strength is a terrible way to maintain safety. We moved away from it in automobiles decades ago for a reason.)

Your comment reeks of typical internet crumple zone worship. You absolutely do need “buff strength” in the parts of a vehicle that hold the occupants. Cabins have only gotten stronger and more rigid with time.

Seems like there'd be a big difference between a train with a thousand tons of carriages pushing it along (ie. Not Going To Stop) and a car that will stop, necessitating a crumple zone to drag that stop over the longest possible period.

If you throw a steel box of eggs at the wall, the box will probably be fine, but not the eggs.

Right - but in this case the steel box is 1000 ton and going straight through the wall, so it's not going to be stopping - in this case you want the steel box to protect the eggs, rather than splattering them by using a cardboard box (carrying on the analogy)

Steel is real! Size of the engine and “fleet” maintenance certainly helps with longevity too - my diesel truck is older than I am

Mass and torque are engineered with very different constraints than speed and responsiveness, so the engine in your truck ( and mine ) simply doesn't turn over as fast as four cylinder car. The car has also faced optimizations for weight in nearly every detail, where nearly the opposite is likely true for your truck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Shorthaul_Railroad runs early 1950s diesels based on the EMD F-class in mainline service.

V/Line still uses some on intercity trains too, though they have of course been rebuilt since the 1950s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V/Line_A_class

> Diesel locomotives are one of those things where the engine can be well over 50 years old and no one bats an eye since it's just not that unusual nor has the styling changed that much to make it obvious

Well hey, look at aircraft. The 747 was only just retired but that's a design from the late 60's.

It's kind of amazing to think of the people who saw these changes - from steam to diesel, from props to jets, all this in a relatively short period of time (first flight to landing on the moon was about 60 years!).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYXEBcZpNQQ

I've seen quite a few lasts (the last shuttle flight, the last 747 rolling off the line, etc) but we do have smart phones and rocket stages that land themselves so there's that.

In science fiction they were talking about nuclear powered trains. Its kind of a shame that never happened. Alas, the real world is more complicated than our beautiful stories.

Also, in a way, there are nuclear powered trains, just the power is delivered via electrical lines.

If you read the Donald Duck/Uncle Scrooge comics from the early 50s everything is "atomic" or "uranium" - clearly it was a very forward-looking time, and not unreasonably so.

In a similar way we will eventually have nuclear powered aircraft and cargo ships. Power and heat from nuclear plants on land will be used to manufacture synthetic liquid fuels.

Synthetic fuels need an energy price of about $1/MWh to be competitive. Intermittent solar will be that price in a few years, I doubt that nuclear will ever hit that price.

I'm probably missing something, but why $1/MWhr? That's far cheaper than gasoline or residential electricity.

Because it takes a lot of energy to make synthetic jet fuel from nothing.

Why does that matter? Anyone with a brain would design a process to start with something better than nothing energy content, perhaps biomass or plastic.

We know how to make synthetic fuel, and right now you either need "real" fuel to go way up in price, or you need $1/mw energy. It's not literally "made from nothing" but it's not made from petroleum products.

If you want to sell synthetic gasoline at $4/gallon and make a profit, $1/MWh or so electricity enables that.

Perhaps, but fuel synthesis processes usually have to run continuously. They can't really start and stop intermittently based on momentary solar power availability. Those plants will represent huge capital investments, the workers will have to be scheduled in advance, and they'll have to make fixed delivery commitments to customers. Some form of carbon tax on fossil fuels might make this more economically viable.

Heat is an input to these processes, so restarting is expensive. That cost has to be weighed against the increased cost of continuous electricity.

> start and stop intermittently

Solar & wind electricity is actually fairly predictable, based on the weather forecast. You don't know what it's going to be next week, but you do have a good idea what it's going to be in an hour. That helps a lot.

> fixed delivery commitments to customers

Maybe in the future, but that's definitely not an issue at the moment because excess production can always be sold without the green premium.

Along the same line of thinking though, they are nuclear powered already. The fossil fuels owe their energy to the sun which is nuclear powered.

I think nuclear powered should be used to something that has a nuclear reactor on board directly supplying power.

Nuclear usually refers to nuclear fission. Fossil fuels are not the product of nuclear fission. Even if they were, saying that things powered by fossil fuels are nuclear powered is just a terrible take.

There were actually plans for nuclear powered locomotives in the 1950'ies. E.g. the X-12 by Lyle Borst. See e.g. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=bVMEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA78&ot...

Most of the country didn’t have cars in 1910. People born in 1900 saw the world go from horse driven to space travel by their 70s. With antibiotics saving countless lives, clean water, running toilets, air conditioning, heat, …

There were also parts of the country that saw "the last electric train"... transitioned to diesel! By 1920, the Milwaukee Road was running 645 miles of electrified railroad between Montana and Tacoma, WA (there was a 216 mile stretch they operated on with steam locomotives). They ran it up until the 1970s!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Milw3_-_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_Road

The Milwaukee Road is also a good business school case study on what happens when a company experiences:

a) overburden with debt

b) deferred maintenance spending on physical plant that's pushed further out all the time until it becomes catastrophically bad

They also screwed up the accounting on the pacific extension, and double entered expenses for it - the only profitable part of the road for years was the pacific extension.

You could reframe the “lasts” as being the “first” moves toward a greener economy.

Yeah, there's been tremendous advances, but many of them aren't as "in your face" as older ones would have been. The A380 would be up there, but that's even on its way out already.

Ha, I came here to post a link to that song. Anyway, here's the Guy Clark version!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxsTZyIS1ck

Many years ago, the Amtrak station near my house had a pedestrian bridge across the tracks, and in those days it wasn't enclosed like it is now. My mother worked and so I spent most days with my grandfather and we would often go fishing in the park nearby. On the way home we'd stop at the station, walk out on that bridge and wait for one of the trains to come through. I had not yet heard "Texas, 1947" then, but when I do now I'm six years old again, watching the express come screaming up from DC on its way to New York. I never did get to lay a nickel on the track.

Yeah, most people have experienced a train coming to a stop at a station; it's way WAY more impressive when it barrels through without even slowing down.

Someday I want to see live steam like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eggYBVAYiI

I was somewhat set back when a train barreled through the station just feets away at 50mph. Sure the p/a warned about that (moments earlier), but still, I didn't expect that from a "nanny" state like Germany.

> I never did get to lay a nickel on the track.

We did it with trams in the city. Somewhat safer ;)

My grandfather went from seeing an early biplane fly over the family's farm in Florida to ending his career working on Navy aircraft and saw us go to the outer planets before he passed. Literally from a couple of years after the Wright brothers to Neptune in one lifetime. We would talk about it; he thought it was pretty cool.

The death of passenger rail in the USA is actually really pointless and sad. E.B. White discusses it in one of his essays. He writes it far better than I can, but the gist is that it used to be that every freight train that carried mail, which was virtually all of them going most anywhere, had to hook up passenger cars too. The railroads lobbied to get this requirement dropped insisting that it was so expensive it was putting them out of business. Pure lies, of course.

I've head there is a bit of a relict though. My understanding is that if you own your own passenger car and pay the switching and storage fees, then you can hook onto a train going wherever for a standard rate.

The death of rail is sad, period. Watching all the steel for the old rail lines being ripped out of the ground since the 1980s is so short sighted. Obtaining rights of way to rebuild lines will be virtually impossible in the modern world. Well, not impossible, but orders of magnitude more expensive than maintaining existing RoW. Even the large scale removal of twinned tracks has removed capacity that previously existed which makes it difficult for passenger rail to coexist with freight. <sigh>

What magic did it take to get these things moving from a dead stop? I assume the clutches were hydraulic or used a retroencabulator. Diesel electric works so well because it removes the clutch, and the electric motor has maximum torque at zero rpm

I believe they used fluid coupling between the engine and the gearbox.

These locotomotives are diesel-electic. Before that it was steam, which can also apply force/torque at zero RPM.

I believe these locomotives were pure diesel, no electric.

These are diesel electric, with 4 traction motors:

https://www.up.com/heritage/fleet/streamliners/index.htm

Edit: what do you mean by "retroencabulator"? That's a fake/joke thing. Which (as you'll know) is a quasi-electrical device anyway so it's not even the right joke.

I'm ashamed of this comment, truly. I'm sorry, I guess? But it doesn't change the fact that the locomotive in the article is a diesel-electric.

Who knew mentioning the retroencabulator would bring such shame. But thanks for the clarification. They are indeed diesel-electric, so no massive clutch-like mechanism. The traction motors are quite small!

https://www.google.com/search?q=EMD+D78&hl=en&source=lnms&tb...

Parts and service very widely available too. I think they also get used as drilling motors.

This blows my mind, that there exists this standard high horsepower generic motor used in a ton of applications. I am going to start seeing the D-77 everywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traction_motor#Power_control

I like how they use a bank of resistors as the transmission, but they are just dumping the difference in heat. Has an electropunk quality to it. I wonder if you could use a retroencabulator to control an A77, they are AC afterall.

OMG, 11k NM of torque. It weighs 2500 kg! You could power one with an electric car battery, probably 2-4 to reach full 350kW.

Could you imagine a robot arm made out of these as servo motors?

http://www.americantraction.com/download/360 (warning this will download a pdf)

The Dutch railway was completely electrified in the 50s back when it was still cheap. The railways had suffered major damage in WW2 so it needed investment anyway.

War leads to major infrastructure overhaul. Rebuild it better.

Most don't know this but the US still has passenger trains and it appears it could be the cheapest way to travel across the US in 2022.

https://www.amtrak.com/tickets/departure.html

Nobody who wants to get across the country in a reasonable amount of time and on schedule should contemplate Amtrak.

If you want a sightseeing tour, that's another matter, it's great for that.

It was indeed great for seeing the country when I was a teenager. These days, the idea of living out of something similar to a first class airline seat does not appeal and sleepers are outrageously expensive.

As a Brit, I'm used to rail journeys taking an extra hour or two due to delays or cancellations. When working and living in the US, I dropped off a friend at Denver station on my way to fly home for Christmas. Upon returning , I didn't know whether to be amused or horrified when he revealed that his train to LA had been delayed by ..... a day and a half !! What?!!! He said he spent a very long happy time, basically a whole day, in the bookstore though, and didn't seem to have any complaints about it, said it wasn't unusual to be that delayed. ;)

> it could be the cheapest way to travel

Inter-city buses are the cheapest way to travel if you don't own a car. For example a train ticket NYC->Washington DC is over $100. A bus ticket for the same trip is $30.

The train will be more comfortable and possibly faster, though.

I traveled coach from CHI(IL) to SAC(CA) with a mountain bike in tow on the Zephyr for $120 at the end of October.

Not aware of anything comparable cost-wise, especially bringing a fully assembled ready to ride mtb along.

Annoyingly however, even a Greyhound bus does the trip faster than the Zephyr. Such is the sad state of passenger rail in the US.

For what it's worth, it's possible to get a NY -> DC ticket (or vice versa) on the NE regional for about $30. You just need to book sufficiently far in advance (IME, around two months). Usually not a weird time either -- I paid $64 for a round-trip weekend ticket during normal hours (early afternoon both ways).

Source: I've taken that train at least 150 times at this point.

Depends on how you define 'cost'. Much as I really wish I could travel by train, 1) there's relatively limited number of places you can go on Amtrack unless you're in the Northeast. 2) Even when served, the path between A and B is often 'non-optimal'. For example, to get from Atlanta to Denver, I have to either go hundreds of miles out of the way looping through New Jersey and Chicago, or South through New Orleans only to have to get on a bus north in El Paso, which means 3) every trip takes far longer than the alternatives. Even if A and B are on the same line. For example, Atlanta to New Orleans is more than 12 hours by train, but I can drive there in less than 8 and fly there in 1.

Amtrak is ok for a leisurely vacation stroll across the country; it's not an alternative for regular business travel.

Beautiful machines! Perfect blend of art/design and engineering!

- Patent for the earlier slanted-nose locomotive design: https://patents.google.com/patent/USD106918S/en

- Patent for the same but with the protruding headlamp: https://patents.google.com/patent/USD129410S/en

For more context, the earlier design looks to be the original Balitimore and Ohio "EA" type, he original E-series engine. One remains in a stuffed and mounted state at the B&O museum in Baltimore.

A similar design was used for the Santa Fe's E1A units.

The protruding headlamp design was in the later design E3A, E4A, and E6A types. (The E4 was unique to the Seaboard Air Line, but the E3 and E6 were produced serially for many operators).

In the days before personal motor cars became common, it must have been wonderful to ride interurbans from place to place. Fast!

There must have been some logical reason they didn't win out, but those Burlington Zephyrs were the best looking diesel streamliners. Those Union Pacific streamlines aren't in the same league.

The Burlington Zephyr was a passenger trainset.

Everything was lightweight. Everything was bespoke.

It wasn’t a general purpose locomotive and the styling was in part for the marketing potential of aesthetic design.

It was not intended for long haul freight service across deserts filled with mountains.

The Fl9 came just a little bit later and ran in regular commuter service into the 2000s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com