Opportunities to Increase Efficiency of Locomotives’ Operation

Abstract

The article contains the analysis of statistics of locomotives’ operation and define main opportunities to increase its efficiency. The main objective of the study is to reveal factors influencing the increase in reliability of locomotives.
Data of the sample of 40 locomotives of main series operated in Russia for the period of 400–500 days are used, which ensures accuracy of results obtained. The method of the study is mainly statistical processing of data. Besides commonly statistically analyzed positions like «in operation» and «faulty» new positions «at the head of the train» (effective work) and some other are considered. The coefficient of useful (effective) work is introduced. As a result, it is proved that feasible level of value-added use of locomotive up to 75 % of total time versus 49 % nowadays is possible. It is shown that reduction of time and cost of technical maintenance and repair of locomotives (TMR) is an important opportunity to increase efficiency of locomotives’ operation. Besides, it has been proved that one of the reasons of over-downtime of locomotives under repair is a significant volume of violations of operating modes, which is also confirmed by statistical data used in previous publications.