(The following story by John D. Boyd appeared on The Journal of Commerce website on June 30, 2009.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Kansas City Southern started receiving the first of 27 yard locomotives and road switcher units that have gone through a re-power upgrade that cuts fuel use and emissions.
The deliveries come soon after the carrier refit two locomotives for its Port Arthur, Texas, yard to low-emission generator sets, which replace the traditional large diesel power block with truck-engine-sized gensets that can be used together or shut down in sequence depending on how much pulling power is needed.
Re-powering is different. It removes the 16-cylinder diesel engine that first came in the locomotive, and replaces it with either an 8- or 12-cylinder model and computer controls. The result is a unit that burns less fuel and meets the latest federal exhaust standards.
Electro-Motive Diesel is doing the work for KCS, which will deploy 11 of the revamped locomotives on Kansas City Southern Railway operations in the United States and 16 on Kansas City Southern de Mexico.
The company showed off the first two this month at its Kansas City, Mo., headquarters before sending them into service.
The program allows KCS to both get more use out of roughly 40-year-old yard tractors that emit too much pollution for today’s clean air rules, and take advantage of public funding programs to help cover the cost.
Spokeswoman C. Doniele Kane earlier told Journal of Commerce that the Texas Emissions Reduction Program would pay most of the re-powering costs for the KCSR units, while KCSM would pay for its own re-powering.
TERP had also paid for KCS to get two hybrid locomotives with rechargeable batteries, but the carrier said that experiment failed and KCS converted them to the gensets that it deployed in March.
Re-powering, the company said, cuts fuel use by 25 percent and oil changes in half, as its new diagnostic systems save on traditional maintenance programs. And it can achieve 70 percent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, which makes the units “eligible for both state and federal funding as clean air projects.”
Besides the public funds it has already lined up, KCS said it “is seeking more for additional projects.”