Kim Hotstart Manufacturing Co., a longtime Spokane maker of electric pre-heaters for diesel engines, says that thanks to a series of big breaks this summer, a relatively new product it developed for railroad locomotives is on track to bring in around $1 million in sales next year.


The company, which serves a host of industrial and transportation-industry customers, has annual sales of about $14 million and employs about 105 people at its 80,000-square-foot plant at 5723 E. Alki in the Spokane Valley.


It introduced the new railroad product, called the Diesel Driven Heating System, or DDHS, four years ago, but until recently sales of the $25,000 device only trickled in as the company worked to fine-tune it. That all changed this summer when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chose the system for a demonstration project aimed at reducing noise and air pollution from idling railroad locomotives. The project sparked interest from the nations largest railroads, caught the eye of railroad industry trade journals, and greatly brightened sales prospects for the systems.


Theres no bigger opportunity we have right now, says Terry Judge, Kim Hotstarts sales and marketing director.


Thats good news for the 60-year-old company, whose sales have been soft in the past couple of years because of the slower U.S. economy. Judge says the manufacturer is seeing signs of improvement in its other lines now, and with the new interest in its railroad product, next year is looking to be a good year. That could mean more jobs at Kim Hotstart, though he says thats not clear yet.


The DDHS is a much-more complex device than the diesel-engine layover heaters Kim Hotstart has sold for railroad locomotives since 1965. Those devices are used commonly in diesel locomotives, which dont use antifreeze and must be kept warm so their engines can restart without damage, especially in the northern U.S. The problem, says Judge, is that to use such heaters, the idled locomotives must be parked near an electrical power source, since the pre-heaters require 480 volts of electricity to do their job.


That, he says, isnt always possible, and running new power lines at a rail yard is expensive, so many railroads simply leave their engines running when they arent in use. Industry statistics show that a long-haul locomotive is idle 54 percent of the time, and that a switching engine, used solely in rail yards, can be idle up to 75 percent of the time.


At the request of the railroads and the EPA, Kim Hotstart began in the mid-1990s investigating a way to heat idled locomotive engines without wiring them to a power source. In 1996, it bought the rights to an invention developed by a former railroad mechanical engineer that uses a combination of water-pressure and heat exchangers to accomplish that task.


That patented device, further developed by Kim Hotstart, turns on automatically when a locomotive is shut down, then turns off when the locomotive is restarted. It includes a three-cylinder, diesel-burning engine and a system of heat exchangers that together perform a host of functions, including creating heat from water pressure to warm the locomotives engine fluids and oil and providing electrical power to recharge the locomotives batteries and power its cab heaters.


The system burns roughly a gallon of diesel fuel an hour, compared with the up to 40 gallons an idling locomotive engine can burn, Kim Hotstart says.


The company says the device could save a railroad more than 25,000 gallons of diesel fuel a year for each switching locomotive. Further, because the DDHS enables a locomotives main engines to be shut down while not in use, it can cut the locomotives emissions by roughly 90 percent and noise by 80 percent, the Spokane company claims. An idling locomotive can belch as much as 5 tons of emissions a year, it says.


Judge says those are big public relations bonuses, since railroads regularly are criticized by neighborhood groups and the EPA for the noise and exhaust created at rail yards.


Arnie McCullough, chief mechanical officer at Pend Oreille Valley Railroad, in Usk, Wash., says that short-line railroad, which was Kim Hotstarts first DDHS buyer, now has four of the systems. The real big advantage is that our crews end up nowhere near the shop, where they could plug into a conventional heater at the end of the day.


McCullough says the railroad hasnt studied exactly how much diesel fuel it saves by using the system, but he thinks it might be about 500 gallons a week per locomotive, and the small railroad usually runs three to six locomotives. Larger concerns are that gummed up diesel and oil in a cold locomotive make a huge mess when it starts up, and parts of the locomotive can wear out if its engine is run continuously to keep it warm.


Under the EPA demonstration project, which was launched in August in Chicago, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Co. bought three of the DDHS systems, and Wisconsin & Southern Railroad bought four, both with financial help from the EPA. The federal agency now is tracking reductions in emissions and noise generated by those seven locomotives, says Judge.


Making a sale to a railroad the size of BNSF, considered a Class 1, or large-scale railway, is a big step for the product, he says. He says the real acid test for a product was always, Have you sold any to a Class 1?


Now that it has, Kim Hotstart has been asked to give about a dozen demonstrations of the product to other railroad executives. RailwayAge magazine described the product extensively in its September issue, and earlier this month, Judge was asked to give a presentation on the DDHS to a national conference on environmental issues affecting railroads.


He says the company could end the year with $300,000 to $500,000 in sales of the product, and expects to do $1 million in salesabout 40 systemsnext year. The long-term prospects for the system are much larger, considering that there are roughly 20,000 locomotives in service in the U.S. and more worldwide.


The device, which measures about 4 feet long by 2 feet wide by 3 feet tall, typically is installed inside the front-end compartment of a larger locomotive, but can fit beneath the walkway of a smaller switch locomotive, Judge says.


Kim Hotstart buys the engine blocks needed for the systems, but makes pretty much everything else for the device at its manufacturing plant here.


Kim Hotstart also this summer inked a marketing agreement with ZTR Control Systems Inc., of Minneapolis, to sell the DDHS system in connection with ZTRs SmartStart control system. That product automatically shuts down and starts up a railroad locomotive based on information from a number of sensors.


Judge says locomotive engineers often simply walk away from an idling locomotive out of habit, even when outside temperatures are reasonably warm or a system is in place to heat the locomotives engine. The DDHS and SmartStart system can work together to automatically turn the engine on and off when needed and run the DDHS the rest of the time to keep the systems warm.


Judge says that although Kim Hotstart had always considered ZTR a competitor, since its product is used widely in the warmer southern U.S. as a solution to reducing engine idling, the marriage is a good one, especially for railroads whose locomotives end up being used both in the northern and southern U.S.


He says Kim Hotstart has other competitors for its DDHS as well, though they use different technologies, such as simple diesel generators that produce electrical power to run pre-heaters. Theres nothing like ours on the market, since ours is patented, Judge says.