Rolling Resistance - Comparing Rolling Resistance of Highway Vehicles and Trains

Comparing Rolling Resistance of Highway Vehicles and Trains

While the specific rolling resistance of a train is far less than an automobile or truck in terms of resistance force per ton, this does not necessarily means that the resistance force per passenger or per net ton of freight is less. It all depends on the vehicle weight per passenger or per net ton transported. Thus one needs to know the rolling resistance per passenger (or per net ton) to make such comparisons.

For 1975, Amtrak passenger trains weighed a little over 7 tones per passenger while automobiles weighed only a little over one ton per passenger. To find the rolling resistance per person one multiples the pounds(force) per ton (2000 times the rolling resistance coefficient) by the tons per passenger. This means that even if the rolling coefficient is several times greater for the auto than for the train, then after multiplication to get pounds/passenger, there is not a lot of difference between the two values (of lb/passenger). Thus there may not be a large difference in the rolling resistance energy used to transport a person by rail as compared to auto.

Read more about this topic:  Rolling Resistance

Famous quotes containing the words comparing, rolling, resistance, highway, vehicles and/or trains:

    We cannot think of a legitimate argument why ... whites and blacks need be affected by the knowledge that an aggregate difference in measured intelligence is genetic instead of environmental.... Given a chance, each clan ... will encounter the world with confidence in its own worth and, most importantly, will be unconcerned about comparing its accomplishments line-by-line with those of any other clan. This is wise ethnocentricism.
    Richard Herrnstein (1930–1994)

    He wrote me sad Mother’s Day stories. He’d always kill me in the stories and tell me how bad he felt about it. It was enough to bring a tear to a mother’s eye.
    Connie Zastoupil, U.S. mother of Quentin Tarantino, director of film Pulp Fiction. Rolling Stone, p. 76 (December 29, 1994)

    You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.
    John Ruskin (1819–1900)

    Off Highway 106
    At Cherrylog Road I entered
    The ‘34 Ford without wheels,
    Smothered in kudzu,
    With a seat pulled out to run
    Corn whiskey down from the hills,
    James Dickey (b. 1923)

    Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.
    Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)

    In this country, you never pull the emergency brake, even when there is an emergency. It is imperative that the trains run on schedule.
    Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)