(The following story by Bruce C. Smith appeared on the Indianapolis Star website on November 26, 2009.)
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — The old story goes that railroaders gave the crossroads community of Avon its name many years ago, and now town officials say they’ve returned the favor.
The town applied for a federal grant on behalf of CSX Transportation that paid 80 percent of the cost of two new, high-tech and environmentally friendly locomotives, which will move trains around the CSX Big Four Yards in Avon.
Town Council President Greg Zusan said the new locomotives will bring cleaner air to Avon.
“At a time that the state is struggling with air quality issues, this is a chance for Avon and CSX to toot our whistle in the efforts to reduce (air pollution) emissions,” he said.
Transportation companies need to have a government partner to apply for federal grants intended to improve air quality and ease traffic congestion.
Avon helped CSX by applying for the federal funds that will pay for a large share of the costs, about $1.4 million for each locomotive.
With their new Cummins diesel engines, the 13-ton locomotives will use about half of the fuel and emit 80 percent fewer air pollutants than older train equipment.
The grant has helped foster a partnership between the town and railroad just at a time when their relationship could be tested. Construction is due to begin soon on a new bridge of the Ronald Reagan Parkway over the railroad yards.
Zusan acknowledged that the bridge project may cause a mess and inconvenience for the railroad company during its construction.
The 5-mile-long CSX rail yard in Hendricks County is a dominant feature in the town and one of the biggest employers in Hendricks County, with about 450 employees in Avon.
CSX unveiled the two locomotives last week at the rail yards in Avon, touting the yard engines as at least 80 to 90 percent environmentally cleaner than most other railroad locomotives in service.
They won’t sit and idle for hours, so the GenSet locomotives will be quieter for nearby homes and businesses, according to CSX and Avon officials.
The new locomotives will be workhorses in Avon, pulling 100 or more cars at a time, at low speed and over short distances. They can’t exceed the 10-mph speed limit in the Avon yard, which handles about 2,000 train cars a day to reassemble trains crisscrossing the country.
The GenSet locomotives are the first in Indiana. They reuse the base of old train engines that have been refurbished and re-engineered to run with highly efficient and computer-controlled Cummins diesel engines made in Seymour.
In each locomotive, an old 2,100-horsepower diesel engine has been replaced by three 700-horsepower, supercharged Cummins engines. Besides enhanced mufflers, air cleaners and other state-of-the-art technology, the key to the ultra-low emissions locomotives is that only enough power is turned on at a time to pull the load. If one or two of the Cummins engines will do the job, then the third remains off.
If the locomotive is unused for a few minutes, the engines go into a sleep mode and turn off.
Unlike older diesels, the engines in the new locomotives are easy to start so they don’t have to idle to stay ready to run.
“These locomotives create 80 percent fewer emissions than a typical rail-yard locomotive and use about 50 percent less fuel,” said Tony Ingram, executive vice president and chief operating officer for Florida-based CSX.
Carl A. Gerhardstein, director of environmental systems for CSX, said there might be even greater cuts in some types of air pollutants, including 86 percent of the particulates and 90 percent of the nitrous oxides. Those are two of the key pollutants measured in federal air pollution standards on railroad equipment to be effective in 2012 and 2015.
The locomotives, built by Illinois-based National Railroad Equipment Co., are a second-generation version of the ultra-low emissions yard engines introduced two years ago to meet stringent air pollution requirements in California, said NRE Vice President James M. Wurtz Jr.
NRE and other train equipment manufacturers are working on versions of ultra-low-emission diesel locomotives that can pull high-speed passenger trains.