CN, a transportation company that offers integrated transportation services: rail, intermodal, trucking, freight forwarding, warehousing and distribution, announced that it is reaping rewards from its Fuel Management Excellence (FMX) program that derives both fuel efficiency and environment benefits.

The company asserted that the FMX program was designed to take it its precision railroad modeling to the next level and offer railroads with substantial rise in both environmental and fuel efficiency benefits.

The company believes that sophisticated fuel efficiency and monitoring systems will aid its efforts to measure and report reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and the scope of the carbon footprints of CN and its customers. CN is making significant strides in improving the fuel efficiency of its freight train operations, obtaining important sustainability gains and delivering a cost-effective transportation service through a series of initiatives, including the acquisition of modern locomotives, new technology applications to existing locomotives, enhanced analytic abilities, and employee training.

Officials with the company claimed that that are particularly excited about their work to set fuel efficiency targets for specific trains by route and to monitor train performance against these goals. The targets are based on established benchmarks for key fuel consumption variables such as train make-up, locomotives, train handling, route gradients and curvature, and weather. This strategy to produce real-time information by train and by locomotive is truly the next frontier in precision fuel management.

Some of the highlights of the FMX program are:

• In 2010 alone CN purchased 102 new high-horsepower locomotives and additional 102 second hand high-horsepower locos that are being upgraded now. Compared to the older and existing machines these new locomotives are 15 percent more fuel efficient.
• the new and upgraded locomotives will feature Wi-Tronix telemetry systems from which they can obtain real-time information about locomotive and train performance through remote measurement and reporting of data, including precise fuel consumption, to an off-board CN computer system at regular intervals or at request.
• Another innovative technology to be installed on the locomotives is the Trip Optimizer technology from GE Transportation. This tech is a train ‘cruise control’ system that follows a pre-determined speed trajectory over a GPS track map to optimize fuel consumption.
• idle diesel engines will be automatically shut down with the aid of the newly deployed Auto Engine Start Stop (AESS) technology and when the locomotive is started again when needed this technology also aids in preparing the machine to a proper operating state.

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