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)
“They mean to tell us all was rolling blind
Till accidentally it hit on mind”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The resistance we make to our passions is due to their weakness, not our strength.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“The highway presents an interesting study of American roadside advertising. There are signs that turn like windmills; startling signs that resemble crashed airplanes; signs with glass lettering which blaze forth at night when automobile headlight beams strike them; flashing neon signs; signs painted with professional touch; signs crudely lettered and misspelled.... They extol the virtues of ice creams, shoe creams, cold creams;...”
—For the State of Florida, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“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)
“Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)