For obvious reasons, not much sense in spending the expense to store the large energy of deceleration or the energy of going downhill - as ships & trains very infrequently do those things.

Would agree with you one ships but trains quite often climb hills and when they do, they need lots of extra power. Even going around a curve requires extra power as all kinds of additional forces are at work. Combine a hill with a curve and the locomotives really have to work extra.

Some of the subway and transit trains in Boston use regenerative braking. They put the power back into the grid (they run on direct current from overhead wire or third rail) as opposed to storing it in a battery. Beats turning it into all heat as conventiona lfriction brakes would do.

Actually, hybrid locomotive switchers are starting coming into the mainstream. Take a look:

http://www.railpower.com/products_hl_ggseries.html

Interestingly, the dead weight associated with the huge battery pack is an advantage to yard switchers.

Not just Super White...Super Duper White...

Wow, nitram I hadn't heard about regenerative brakes on the T - or is it the Commuter Rail that does that?

I found a document (PDF) that references the "cold-iron" question:
http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/offroad...tion%20Plan%22
One of the goals half-way through the document is to ensure that all ships at port are running on shore power at Long Beach and LA. That would suggest to me there's not a whole lot of it going on right now... .

That document anticipates eliminating 12,148tons/year of Nitrogenous pollutants from the air around LA - a major smog pollutant. I doubt everybody in LA buying a Prius would have as much impact on NOx as that.

That San Pedro Bay plan looks to cover just about everything I asked about in this thread in fact, at least for the West coast - that's a great find, good searching! Here's a list of documents via Google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=San+P...en-US:official

And just for fun, here's a zoomin on just one of many tankers at port in Long Beach when Google took their satellite photos:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=los+an...k&om=1&iwloc=A
Zoom out slowly to get an idea of just how insanely large that port is - and how busy.

Hahaha one last one - one of the best ways of reducing NOx from a truck without changing the way the engine works is adding an "SCR" filter.
http://www.epa.gov/cleandiesel/ports/technologies.htm
Note the way that those are maintained - "periodic refilling of a urea tank." Interesting.

Prius 2006, bought September 14:

The new Green Line cars and the Red Line cars have regen. Not sure about the rest of the subway lines. The commuter rail uses diesel so I doubt they have regen - where would it go?

The urea tank is about the only thing keeping diesels from meeting CA emissions if I remember correctly. From what I read, they can't get certification unless they make the tank big enough to last 100,000 (?) miles which would take up a lot of room. Otherwise, once the tank was empty you would be back to a conventional diesel exhaust. I'm sure that will continue to develop.

Very interesting, note that the diesel engine is 7% of normal size. Just suitable for short distances however, as the diesel is not powerful enough to supply rolling resistance at full speed, but undoubtably with a larger diesel this could be done. Of course fuel efficiency gains would be much less over distance since trains tend to run at fairly consistent speed with minimal hill climbing.

The distributed nature of the batteries across the locomotive probably helps traction a great deal as well.

It is unfortunate that this can't be used for typical hauling though; unfortunate that it's not a "road train." Just learning the train terms here (switcher being one that assembles trains, road train being one that I would normally think of as a train).

Prius 2006, bought September 14:

Can you imagine the impact this would have on oil and fuel prices if the trucking industry moves to hybrid trucks. Even if they can only increase by say2 miles per gallon it would decrease by a large margin our dependence on oil.

Though this is a bit of a change of topic, I believe the lowest hanging fruit for improving truck efficiency is aerodynamics. The tractor portion could be designed in such a way to deflect the air much better, and covering up things like pipes, gratings, steps etc. with smooth plates where possible. I imagine even bigger improvement would be possible on most trailers, such as air deflectors that could be positioned in front and behind the wheel sets, and skirting below the containers. If so inclined, I'm sure that much better aerodynamics could be added for minimal capital, and coudl lead to big improvments in fuel economy.

But newer locomotive do store energy from braking. Making them more true hybrids.