hobo1960 wrote:My information said that the 1.2 million per engine cost put the end of UP's interest in the project.
KevinB
Those 1950's dollars equate to 120 millions of 2019 dollars presumably, and that is most likely without the cost of decommissioning the locomotive's nuclear components once the fuel has run out. For the 1950's engineers and scientists were woefully naive on this part of the nuclear cycle.
Say the Big Nukes were the equivalent of the Big Boy and Big Blow, the UP would likely need about 40-50 of those 6000 h.p. locomotives them to pull their transcontinental freight trains through the sparsely populated western USA it served.
In comparison, would electrifying those lines and using electric locomotives running on power generated in stationary atomic power stations be a more economically feasible option to transport that volume?
Did that AAR study also include the pro's and con's of electrifying the UP transcon?
