Liquefied natural gas (LNG) railway tenders, destined for use on the Canadian National Railway, have been received by Electro-Motive Diesel, the world's largest diesel locomotive manufacturer.
The remaining LNG tenders, each equipped with a fuel tank capable of carrying 45,500 litres of LNG, are to be delivered by July, reports Railway Age.
The specially adapted engines and tenders will be put through stationary tests before being handed over to Canadian National for a pilot programme on tracks this summer, said the report.
It is the first small step in what could be a revolution. Just as diesel locomotives ousted steam trains in the middle of the 20th century, LNG could replace diesel in the 21st, says Reuters.
But experts concede the cost of conversion will be staggering.
Despite the apparent cost savings from switching to gas from diesel, there are also "key uncertainties", said the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).
With diesel expected to cost more than three times as much as natural gas on an energy-equivalent basis until at least 2040, there is a strong financial incentive to switch.
But switching from diesel to natural gas will be costly. New fuelling stations and delivery systems would need to be built and run alongside diesel systems, adding costs and maintenance expenses.
CN engines are designed to run on a mix of LNG and diesel, and would be able to run on diesel when LNG was unavailable.
There are more than 25,000 locomotives in service with the Class 1 railroads and the cost of replacing them and equipping them with new fuelling infrastructure will run into tens of billions of dollars, the EIA says.
The EIA has therefore produced a range of scenarios for the future uptake of LNG by railways.
In the agency's High Rail LNG case, all freight locomotives would switch to LNG between 2020 and 2040. But in the Low Rail LNG case, dual-fuel engines would be introduced into the fleet at a rate of just one per cent a year from 2020.
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