When one looks at modern transportation, trains always come up. That makes sense - US railroads use one third the fuel for every ton-mile that a truck does, and when two or three-man train crew can move 300 trucks' worth of goods, you get a major labor cost savings, too. These factors are why US rail traffic went ballistic in the last 40 years - it's more than
tripled in that timeframe.
But when it comes to modern trains, they are all diesel or electric. Building electric trains is expensive, diesel trains rely on oil, which the US imports in vast quantities. But what if the
ACE 3000 Project had succeeded?
The ACE 3000 was to make a steam locomotive that would work for modern railroads. Now, the first design did NOT make all of the efficiencies that it could have, the idea still caught a lot of interest, particularly in the very coal-rich US. Among its people were Argentinian engineer L.D. Porta and Brit David Wardale, the latter having build the legendary South African Class 26NC, which was commonly referred to as the "Red Devil". The idea looked almost certain to succeed in the 1980s, but financial problems and lower oil prices doomed it.
What if this project had succeeded?
Could fleets of these be blasting across North America? And could these even be used in other nations with big coal reserves - China, Australia, Great Britain?