The Iowa Interstate Railroad imported two steam locomotives from China and
had them customized for legal use here in the States.
http://www.iaisrr.com/sites/iaisrr.com/files/Steam_0.pdf
I photographed them coming through Grinnell and they really are an amazing
thing to watch.
This railroad had bought these for experimentation to see if they could be
used in actual fleet use. The short answer is yes, but the manual labor
costs ate up the savings in fuel. As a general rule, it takes 20 man-hours
of operation and maintenance for every hour of rail time.
This past fall, they attempted to set the world-record for amount of freight
pulled by steam on a scheduled run. Their site is a bit slack when it comes
to news, but I think they did set the record.
The Iowa Interstate tracks run right past my office as well as near my home.
Every once in a while you'll see the steam engines go past, but mostly it's
the new locomotives. They had a horribly ancient fleet of engines, but over
the past year or two have upgraded their fleet to the latest/greatest
engines. These things are like twice as efficient and twice as powerful as
the old engines they replaced. So, they've been able to reduce their engine
count by up to 75% on their runs.
A good operation.
AG
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