Christopher Tidy wrote:
Any gearbox experts here? Just puzzling over why really big
gearboxes are commonly avoided. Locomotives mostly use electric
transmission and the reliability of gearboxes in things like
wind turbines isn't great.

On locomotives you need some means to connect an engine doing
and requiring a couple of hundreds revs/min to wheels doing
zero revs/min with some hundreds of kilonewtons drawbar power
when taking off.

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"I'm a doctor, not a mechanic." Dr Leonard McCoy
"I'm a mechanic, not a doctor." Volker Borchert