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A diesel electric locomotive has no serious batteries, and no room for enough batteries to consume the energy of slowing down a train.

At least it can dump it as heat without also producing fine dust, like mechanical brakes do.

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hylaride 4 days ago | parent [-]

They can (and do) have room if they're designed from the ground up for it. The engines for diesel electric trains are so large because they need to be sized to drive power for peak energy (usually accelerating and hills). If the energy can be stored, the engines for hybrid locomotives themselves can (and are) smaller.

So far you're only seeing hybrid locomotives for trains that stop/start a lot (shunting trains and passenger rail). The cutover for freight will likely take decades because A) locomotive lifetimes are measured in decades and B) longer range freight usually has less stop/start, making it's economical delta less.

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foobarian 4 days ago | parent [-]

I would imagine long range freight would be more likely to have long stretches of uphill grade which would mess with the minimum battery size

	▲	hylaride 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, that could be a problem. Even modern trains often now have multiple locomotives (including in the middle of train sets) to deal with range/weight, so who knows. There’s no reason hybrid trains can’t have multiple locomotives or battery bank-cars for those situations. As I mentioned above, the freight lines are very conservative with new tech and amortize equipment over decades (often to the point where many rail cars are unsafe, especially outdated tank cars), so even if it exists we won’t see it in practice for awhile yet.