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)
“The Concord had rarely been a river, or rivus, but barely fluvius, or between fluvius and lacus. This Merrimack was neither rivus nor fluvius nor lacus, but rather amnis here, a gently swelling and stately rolling flood approaching the sea. We could even sympathize with its buoyant tied, going to seek its fortune in the ocean, and anticipating the time when “being received within the plain of its freer water,” it should “beat the shore for banks.””
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.”
—French National Assembly. Declaration of the Rights of Man (drafted and discussed August 1789, published September 1791)
“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)
“Only by the supernatural is a man strong; nothing is so weak as an egotist. Nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike ephemeral.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm’s way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)