What type of Diesel do North American Class I railroads use, and how do I find the crack spread from WTI?

Question

What type of Diesel do North American Class I railroads use, and how do I find the crack spread from WTI?

Answer 1

If you are thinking of investing in petroleum refiners as a play seeing how well U.S. railroad stocks are doing, I would discourage it.

The crack spread (for those who don't know what it is) is the amount of money a refiner makes by turning a barrel of crude oil into usable products such as gasoline, diesel, heating oil, etc.  And the recent refining margins are nothing like what they used to be:  http://www.oilintel.com/spothome.cfm?loc...

Pure refiners like Valero, Tesoro, Sunoco, etc. are getting hammered in the stock market because of poor refining margins brought on by skyrocketing crude prices.

The money in the energy sector right now are in the companies that do exploration and crude production.

Answer 2

Number 2 diesel. Crack spread seems like kind of a personal question to me.I'm not that kinda boy anyways so I can't help you answer that one.

Answer 3

I am not exactly sure what you're asking but most Class I railroads operate either Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD) or General Electric (GE) built diesel-electric locomotives using either AC or DC powered traction motors.  If you're interested in each Class I's fleet the below website covers each one.

Answer 4

Alco and Rango are right on...

As far as the crack goes, you can get it on almost every street corner in any urban-blighted areas.

Answer 5

To answer your question, American Class I's generally use use #2 diesel (except, it is mixed with #1 in some cold climes in winter).

Can't give you exact numbers on the WTI crack spread, but I am guessing it is WAY positive right now.  Have you tried using the Nymex calculator?

Answer 6

The diesel engine in  General Electric locomotives is a 4 cycle turbocharged engine, EMD locomotives I believe are a two cycle engine. They use number 2 diesel fuel with fuel preheaters for cold weather operation.

Not sure about spreading anyone's crack, not really my thing.

The track spread is 4' 8 1/2" between the rails.