Why Locomotives Leave Their Engines Running All Night

You have seen it even if you never thought about it. You drive past a rail yard late at night and there they are. A line of locomotives, parked, going nowhere, nobody aboard. And every single one of them is running. Idling in the dark, burning fuel, doing absolutely nothing, for hours. Sometimes for days. Your first thought is the obvious one. What a waste. Shut them off. So why does a machine that burns thousands of gallons of diesel sit there idling until sunrise with not a soul in the cab? It turns out there are real reasons, and good ones, and the railroads hate every single one of them because that idling is costing them a fortune. In this video we walk through exactly why locomotives almost never shut off. We start with the cold, because a diesel locomotive does not use antifreeze. It runs on plain water, so nobody dumps hundreds of gallons of toxic glycol on the ground if a line lets go. But water freezes, and a frozen engine block cracks wide open into a repair bill in the tens of thousands. We get into why starting one of these sixteen cylinder monsters is nothing like turning a key, why a locomotive that will not restart out on the road is a railroad's worst nightmare, and how the air brake system quietly bleeds down the moment the engine stops. And then we get to the number that makes this a real story. A single major railroad can burn over twenty million gallons of fuel a year just idling. More than four percent of everything it burns. Forty million dollars a year, going straight up the stack while the locomotives sit still. We finish with the decades long war the railroads have fought against their own machines, the automatic shutdown systems, the auxiliary power units, the plug in yards, and the one stubborn truth that still wins on the coldest nights. If you ever worked a yard on a freezing night, the comments are for you. The machine is easier to keep alive than it is to bring back from the dead. #RailroadHistory #LegendaryLocomotives #DieselLocomotive #Railroad #TrainHistory #Locomotive #FreightTrain #RailroadEngineering #HowTrainsWork