In 1904, New York City passed an ordinance prohibiting the use of smoke-emitting locomotives in the city limits. This law was only possible because there was an alternative — electric locomotives. The big problem with such locos was that they could only go where the power supply went. Either a third rail or a trolley wire had to be extended into an area. Sometimes switching was done with a string of flat cars to reach into unpowered territory for delivery and pickup of freight cars.
By 1912, General Electric was experimenting with a small switcher loco that used a gasoline engine to drive a generator that supplied the power to make this small juice jack operate. It was intended just for use in working cars in and out of unpowered territory such as service spurs. This initial experiment wasn’t especially successful, but it was a good beginning. By 1918, a more substantial gasoline-powered experiment fared some better, though it still lacked the horsepower to be truly successful.
In 1922, Electro-Motive Engineering was founded to make gas-electric rail coaches. Most of these used a combine passenger car with a gasoline engine driving a generator. The works were in the baggage area, taking up much of that space and offering a small cab for the operator. The truck beneath that end was basically a heavy trolley truck. These cars were often called “doodlebugs,” and they kept branchline operations alive for at least a few more years. EME became Electro-Motive Corporation in 1925 and would go on to become EMD, a division of General Motors.
In 1925, a consortium of Alco, GE, and Ingersol-Rand cobbled together the first commercially successful diesel-electric switcher locomotive. This “Box Cab” featured a carbody by Alco, electrical equipment from GE, and a diesel engine constructed by IR. It is very important to note that there was no new technology in this locomotive; it was constructed entirely by recombining off-the-shelf parts. Because the main method of moving the locomotive and its cars was done with electric motors, these machines were the first Electric Platform Vehicles (EPV).
But you already knew all that. The magic comes when we apply it to the automobile. The gasoline engine was being developed when the first trolley systems were being built. As trolleys began to cruise around the streets of certain American cities, the first horseless carriages were making their appearance. That basic form of the automobile hasn’t changed appreciably, despite the modernization of the components and appearance. We still have a Variable-Speed, Internal Combustion engine working through a Mechanical Drive train. The automobile as it is found all over the world today is still a VS, IC, MD machine, no matter how fancy it gets.
We might learn some things from the modern diesel locomotive, a contemporary EPV. The wheels are turned by electric motors geared directly to the axles without variable speed transmissions and mechanical drive trains. The most up-to-date railroad EPVs use advanced technology to improve performance radically. Some use batteries combined with fixed speed generator sets to keep the batteries charged. This takes advantage of the simple fact that high electrical demand takes place only briefly and then drops back down for extended periods of time. Automobiles often operate in cities the same way, in stop-and-go driving.
Modern diesel locomotives use AC traction motors to get better performance. An AC electric motor delivers more power per pound than its DC equivalent and it also offers more effort per unit of electrical power. Best of all, AC motors don’t overheat in the same way that DC motors do. When coupled with computers, vastly superior control and operation results, especially when you have a small motor on each wheel as opposed to the central large motor of the modern hybrid.
At the bottom, an electric motor can function from 0 to nearly 300 mph on the French TGV without shifting gears because electric motors have that sort of RPM range. Motors are geared directly to the wheel axles without energy-wasting multi-speed transmissions. The expense and weight of the entire driveline is replaced with motors and cables.
Just as the diesel-electric locomotive came along and replaced the steam locomotive, so it’s time for the Electric Platform Vehicle to put the old VSIC-powered automobile out to pasture. The variable speed part has been delivering only about 16 percent efficiency, even less than the steam’s average tractive efficiency. Modern AC traction locomotives can get up to forty percent efficiency. That’s more than double the fuel efficiency!
No differential technology is required when each wheel has its own motor. The wheel that needs to go faster around a curve will, because it can. Even better, with a computer controlling each wheel separately, when one wheel slips, its power is reduced until it is turning the same speed as the others, recovering its traction and improving efficiency. This happens in a fraction of a second.
And it’s all off the shelf right now. We have the motors, the computers, the power inverters, the gensets, and the batteries, all on the shelf. A fifty hp engine that wouldn’t pull your car could be enough in a fixed-speed alternator system that would charge your car batteries in low demand times, giving you 80 to 100 miles per gallon and range equal to modern cars. When you hang around trains, you figure out stuff like this.