Whenever I've seen locomotive mileage figures, I usually have trouble understanding why they're so low. This one seems particularly low, amounting to 220km/day. I thought one of the usual claimed advantages of diesels was higher availability than steam, but I know that late US freight steam could do better than this.
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| Posted by FSWood on June 6, 2024 | |
Fresh paint looks grand. Four million kilometers! They are definitely getting their money's worth from that purchase.
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When looking at daily average travel, consider that Greece doesn't have the long runs like the US or Canada. The total standard gauge trackage is slightly over 1600 km, (1035 miles, per wikipedia) and the mainline between Athens and Thessaloniki is about 520 km.
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| Posted by Triplex on January 18, 2025 | |
I don't see how the length of *single* runs makes any difference, and I'm saying that I've seen low mileage figures for North American and other trains.
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| Posted by FSWood on January 19, 2025 | |
Length of single runs makes a difference & size/length of entire system makes an even greater difference, Greece is about the size of Alabama and fifty years of being confined to running within Alabama is a very different ballgame from fifty years, or even ten years of running the BNSF and Amtrak route from LA to Chicago, which is approximate to running from Lisbon, Portugal, to Warsaw, Poland. That 4 million km on A509's odometer is about equal to to 1,200 one way trips between Lisbon and Warsaw, or LA and Chicago, all done within an area the size of Alabama. Hmm, with Alabama being around 330 miles, 530km tall, how many trips up and down Alabama would it take to rack up 4,000,000km? That's a hair over 7,500 trips up and down Alabama. So, you will need around 150 trips a year up and down Alabama to accumulate 4,000,000 km over 50 years. (this math may or may not be perfect, I'm on meds for muscle spasms)
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| Posted by Triplex on January 22, 2025 | |
As I understand, diesels anywhere are available for service most of the time, and EU freights are scheduled unlike USA. I know the MX636 were used on passenger trains, and even on through freights rather than local switching... It should be trivially easy to run Athens-Thessaloniki every day, at least in passenger service possible to make the *round trip* in a day. Even the best of US steam (not diesel)... NKP 2-8-4s, when in fast through freight service, could avg 8000mi/month, ~425km/day. It doesn't really matter if *trains* ran 1000 miles at once because individual steam engines didn't.
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