Canadians derailed a train and drove it to City Hall for power after a ice storm
> Once at its destination and hooked in, its V12 had to be run at a specific, constant rpm' to generate AC current at 60 hertz, the frequency used by most North American utilities.<p>I don't think this is exactly right. I'm sure it wasn't consistent either, but few loads really cared too much.<p>From the article's link, about a different locomotive doing the same thing:<p>> Conrail actually had a set of standing instructions on how to provide quasi-commercial power from a locomotive.  For an SD40-2, you attach to the bus before the diodes.  Operating in notch 6 runs the generator at 647 RPM.  Since the AR10 is a 10 pole machine, that gives 64.7 Hz power.  You could tweak the governor to get it closer to 60 Hz if you really wanted to, but for powering everything but clocks, it's close enough.  I think the method for regulating the voltage was to disconnect the load regulator from it's governor-powered vane motor and dialing the voltage in manually.  The output is 3 phase power.  Max output in notch 6 is about 1000KW.  If the avg home draws 2-3 KW on the avg, that'd power several hundred homes.<p><a href="http://cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/t/194245.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/t/194245.aspx</a>