Yes.

Some rail lines do better. The Soo Line, which is the U.S. branch of the Canadian Pacific, operating in the upper Midwest, reported moving each ton of freight 517.8 miles per gallon of diesel fuel, on average. Lines operated by the Grand Trunk Corp. reported 510.5 ton-miles per gallon.

The national average figure of 436 miles is the highest on record, according to AAR, and a 3.1 percent increase from the 423-mile figure reached in 2006.

The rail industry says its fuel efficiency has increased by 85 percent since 1980. It attributes that to factors that include using new and more efficient locomotives, training engineers to conserve fuel, using computers to assemble trains more efficiently in the yard and to plan trips more efficiently to avoid congestion, and reducing the amount of time engines are idling.

“We had a look at it and thought ‘We might actually be able to use this’,” said Karl Sundholm, project leader at Jernhusen, which also owns the station. “This feels good. Instead of just airing the leftover heat out we try to make use of it.”

Jernhusen markets the building as “environment smart” and aims for its energy consumption to be half of what a corresponding building usually is.

The bodily warmth from the central station will be redirected to heat up water. The investment will be around 200 000 Swedish crowns, Sundholm said.

If running biodiesel isn’t enough, the trains also produce energy!

From their press release:

In addition to the environmental benefits of the Voyager trial, Virgin’s Pendolino electric trains return 17 percent of the power they use to the national grid every time they brake, making the Pendolino fleet one of the most efficient in the world. Over the course of a year this is enough to power 11,825 homes. These trains emit 76 percent less CO2 than cars or domestic flights.

A company is proposing to take old airplane fuselages and convert them into monorails. This just sounds cool! And it is! Energy for the trains comes from solar power, wind power, and regenerative breaking.

This is such a good use for old environmentally unfriendly technology because it takes it and makes it into a sustainable transportation system.

It has yet to be prototyped, but let’s hope that this system is built.

“The system, which has been developed by Hitachi in Japan, consists of a battery-assisted diesel-electric traction engine. The traction unit uses the battery when the train is at rest and in the early stages of acceleration up to around 30 kilometres an hour (19mph), at which point the conventional diesel engine kicks in.”