Articles of September 2009

The assembly hall is filled with locomotives, some of them missing their roofs, others without control cabins. And some are even mounted on temporary platforms that make them appear to be floating on air. Martin Leitel, who is responsible for making life cycle assessments of locomotives for Siemens Mobility in Allach, Germany, points to a yellow locomotive without a roof. "That one's going to Australia," he says, a country where rail service operators recently started making energy conservation a higher priority. In fact, the model will be the first electric locomotive on the island continent to be equipped with an energy recovery system. The system collects braking energy generated on downhill stretches by trains full of coal that are traveling from the interior of the country to the coast. It then feeds the energy into the grid for use by empty trains going uphill.

Another locomotive, Leitel explains, is for a European leasing company. It's equipped with a transformer that achieves optimal efficiency because it was built using more copper than is usual, which also makes it heavier than similar units. In order to compensate for the transformer's additional weight, other parts of the locomotive must be lighter, which is why its roof is made of aluminum. Naturally, all of this results in higher energy consumption during manufacturing. But, as Leitel points out, after only a few years of operation, the transformer's high efficiency and the aluminum's light weight counterbalance these energy costs.

Such conflicts are a part of Leitel's routine. In addition to conducting life cycle assessments (LCAs), his job at the Allach locomotive factory near Munich is to ensure coordination with customers when drawing up custom-tailored technical specifications for their locomotives. Combining these two goals has proved to be a good idea. "Customers