ELECTRICITY KEEPING ITS OWN BOOKS. Years ago, electrified railroads used regenerative braking both to keep trains in control downhill and to reduce their power bill. The technology was state-of the art before the bi-polars hailed by a Milwaukee Road publicist with the phrase I employed in the title. Early electric locomotives had simple motors that could easily be turned into generators. Contemporary electric locomotive practice makes use of a number of solid-state tricks that would no doubt have fascinated Nikola Tesla to achieve the same effect. Word has reached Cold Spring Shops of the application of regenerative braking to diesels.

Bearing road number 2010, the 4,400 horsepower Evolution® Hybrid diesel-electric prototype will feature a series of innovative batteries that will capture and store energy dissipated during dynamic braking. The energy stored in the batteries will reduce fuel consumption and emissions by as much as 10 percent compared to most of the freight locomotives in use today. (In addition to reduced emissions, a hybrid will operate more efficiently in higher altitudes and up steep inclines.)

(Are the batteries being used to augment the power available from the diesel-alternator powerplant uphill?)

I enjoy the adaptation of ideas from the early days of railroading to more clever technology. Years ago, and also motivated by environmental awareness, freight railroads purchased tri-Power locomotives that could run on batteries, overhead catenary or third rail, and use a diesel-generator power plant to haul cars or to recharge the batteries. Those were probably used in too slow a service for anyone to consider using regenerative braking to recharge the batteries, although that was feasible with the control circuitry of the day. (Submarines had that capability. We have U-505 in Chicago today because the Navy team that captured it used the freewheeling propellors to spin the motors and recharge the batteries while it was in tow.)

Destination:Freedom notes the introduction of the hybrid dual-power diesel as well as an upcoming test of the same technology on a British InterCity 125 rake. They also engage in some wishful thinking.

[National Corridors] welcomes GE’s latest contribution to reducing fuel consumption of diesel locomotives, however [it] believes a better long-term approach for recapturing braking energy in various rail vehicles in order to reduce energy consumption and exhaust emissions might be to introduce railroad electrification on a broad scale.

Electrification of main rail corridors would utilize existing off-the-shelf railway electrification technology and hardware, instead of relying on development certainly expensive and possibly hazardous high energy battery storage systems for the nation’s many thousands of diesel locomotives.

Railway electrification provides for nearly unlimited regenerative braking in modern electric powered locomotives and EMU railcars with the same or superior ability to recapture braking energy as diesel-hybrid locomotives. Electrification also enables railroads to power their fleets with other energy sources instead of just green house gas producing diesel fuel typically made from expensive foreign oil.

So we burn neutrons and Powder River coal instead, and somebody has to pony up for the catenary. Diesel fuel prices are not yet high enough for anyone to seriously look at that prospect, although the idea of some musical thyristor-controlled motors with the authority of a Great Northern W-1 topping the Cascades and keeping electricity's books downhill with 125 stack cars on appeals.