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I'm just looking for ballpark numbers in order to plan out my oil refinery setup.

Also for that matter, how much energy does a single train use while moving?

Each locomotive uses about 10 rocket fuel per hour.

So multiply that by your total number of locomotives, and reduce it by the time spent waiting.

So lets say 50 double headed trains running 100% of the time. 50 * 2 * 10 = 1000 rocket fuel per hour, or about 16.7 rocket fuel per minute. That sounds quite mild, especially compared to the amount of rocket fuel consumed by the rocket itself.

trqwe wrote:So lets say 50 double headed trains running 100% of the time. 50 * 2 * 10 = 1000 rocket fuel per hourf.

I think it's only 50*10 = 500. On double headed trains, only one locomotive is running at a time.

It can even be crudely calculated. A locomotive consumes 600kW and is 100% efficient. So it consumes 0.6MJ/second.

To the extent of my knowledge, locomotives use full power when going forward. They use nothing when going backwards (being pulled), braking, or stopped. I don't believe there is any case where they use only a fraction of full power.

A rocket fuel contains 225MJ of energy so will provide a locomotive with 225 / 0.6 = 375s of runtime. 10 Rocket Fuel will provide 3750s of runtime - and there are 3600 seconds in an hour, so 10 rocket fuel per hour is indeed a good estimate if the trains spend negligible time stopped (in fact it can be said precisely that a locomotive will never use more than 9.6 rocket fuel an hour). Double header trains will use fuel at the same rate as single header trains, not twice the rate, as only the locomotives going forward will actually be burning fuel.

You don't even need to use rocket fuel - most of my trains run on coal. But, then again, I built them in 0.14 when there was no speed difference, so I'll probably switch them over eventually. In other words, I have no idea, however I'm fairly sure rocket fuel burns several times longer than coal, so the amount should be relatively small - mid game 1-2 should be fine, and later in the game slowly scaling it up to keep with demand should be relatively easy. Later on, 3 assemblers gets you ~1 per 10 seconds, or 6 per minute. With a small amount of downtime, that should be enough for at least 40 trains, using BlakeMW's formula.

Also: people mentioned that you will only be running 1 engine at a time on double headers, but if you use 2-6-2s or 2-8s or some other train with multiple forward facing engines, you will be using twice as much fuel.