Well all you would, in theory, have to do to make a hybrid diesel electric locomotive is a huge bank of batteries. Uh, where the hell would you put them? Are we going to see the return of tenders or something? And after that, where are you getting the extra power to charge the batteries? all the power (as far as I know) goes to the traction motors. Will you increase engine output going downhill? that seems like it would waste more fuel then it saves.
I will not say its a waste of time, but it does seem like a fishy concept, unless they plan to reinvent the diesel electric locomotive.
precisely this HAS been done, not by g.e., unless they bought them out. the product was/is called the green goat. up's been, or was a couple of years ago, playing with, trying out, beta testing, whatever you want to call it, one of the demo's.
it was in our yard here in roseville for a while, with a bunch of tec-reps in white labcoats hovering over it more often the it was seen moving.
i did do a fallow up on that, out of curiousity seeing it setting there, and did find the website of the company making and, at that time, intending to mass produce and market them.
that was three of four years ago, something like that, and i haven't checked back or heard anything newer since.
basically it looked like a streatched sw-1500. with a much smaller then usual diesel generator package, and the rest of that extended hood filled with a huge array of storage batteries.
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hybreds, those as a sop to environmental concerns, are a stop gap compromise between what needs to be done and what people are familiar with/making a buck off of. as long as burning ANYTHING (except hydrogen, which has other problems) is involved, carbon is being dumped into the atmosphere. stored energy with systems of automatically recharging it off a clean energy supplied grid at stopping places, seems to me the more effective and realistic solution for mechanical transportation.
and of course even batteries have problems that can be nit picked. one way arround both chemical problems AND burning anything is to use other means of storing energy. compressed air, escarpments (wind ups, don't laugh, it IS tecnically pheasable) and flywheels are examples of this. there is something called the perry people mover that uses the last of these, and is, about as 'clean' as a form of mechanical transportation can be made to be.
(the battery/catenary idea is a good one too, or even streight catenary, if every kind of way of generating energy that DOESN'T involve burning anything is what is fed into 'the grid' that feeds the catenary system)
reducing energy consumption by reducing form factor of both vehicule and guideway sturcture is one of my main attractions to narrow gauge and very narrow gauge
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Professor Claude
