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I had a look at some of the other Q&A's around that point and very disappointed to see that Peter Hendy apparently believes the unelectrified Bath and Temple Mills branches are satisfactory and that discontinuous electrification is the right answer to EWR.
By contrast, I'm impressed about how switched on these random MPs are about this stuff.
I had a look at some of the other Q&A's around that point and very disappointed to see that Peter Hendy apparently believes the unelectrified Bath and Temple Mills branches are satisfactory and that discontinuous electrification is the right answer to EWR.
By contrast, I'm impressed about how switched on these random MPs are about this stuff.
Good example. The cost of wiring up Chippenham - Bristol will be in the region of £2-300m
Playing devil’s advocate, we know that Hitachi have proved battery techonology on the 800 series trains, therefore it would seem possible to equip, say, a third or half of the fleet with batteries in place of their generator sets to operate the Bristol and Swansea services. If you can do that for less than £200m (and I rather think you can) then you have electric services for cheaper, no ?
Good example. The cost of wiring up Chippenham - Bristol will be in the region of £2-300m
Playing devil’s advocate, we know that Hitachi have proved battery techonology on the 800 series trains, therefore it would seem possible to equip, say, a third or half of the fleet with batteries in place of their generator sets to operate the Bristol and Seansea services. If you can do that for less than £200m (and I rather think you can) then you have electric services for cheaper, no ?
Off-topic, but Swansea to Cardiff would benefit from an EMU acceleration on the Swanline services. I do not believe there are options for self-contained operations on the Bristol to Chippenham
However, the advent of battery technology will definitely help with electrification.
Maybe some of the former MML occasional extensions can be added back when battery technologies allow. It would still be sensible to have the whole core route wired.
I had a look at some of the other Q&A's around that point and very disappointed to see that Peter Hendy apparently believes the unelectrified Bath and Temple Mills branches are satisfactory and that discontinuous electrification is the right answer to EWR.
By contrast, I'm impressed about how switched on these random MPs are about this stuff.
There are reasons to be optimistic about future electrification from reading this https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/15124/pdf/ Peter Hendy and Alex Hynes mentioned the importance of a rolling programme to ensure cost effectiveness and a steady work stream for the supply chain and work teams. They implied that the government understand this and it should be a key mission of Great British Railways. I can understand other forum members being sceptical about discontinuous electrification but surely discontinuous is better than not electrifying a route, and is a basis for further electrification. Until a few weeks ago it seemed East West Rail would be a diesel railway. Now they've announced a preference for discontinuous electrification people are disappointed because it's not full electrification. Given the financial situation and justified suspicion in government about infrastructure scheme costs, I think EWR have made the best decision they could (and are not hostages to fortune over what may be decided, and when, about electrification from Didcot to Oxford).
The relevance of this to Midland Main Line electrification is that if electrification north from Wigston is not announced next year it will make Hendy's, Hynes' and others upbeat comments about electrification seem very hollow. As I said in post #7783 further MML electrification is going to be essential for BEMU operation of many regional services. It is concerning that projects of this kind go through endless reevaluations and reviews with every change of government, even changes of minister. British Rail's electrification projects in the 1970s, West Coast Crewe-Glasgow, Great Northern Kings Cross-Royston, survived changes of government and very tight public spending controls.
Pity that Peter Hendy didn't give a more honest answer to the committee question about why Britain is slow to electrify. He focussed on costs, but really it's about privatisation and the lost decades of long term vision and planning for the railways that Railtrack never had, and Network Rail took a while to find. British Rail electrified steadily, and if given the opportunity to carry on, we would likely have had Great Western electrification in the 1990s, MML in the 2000s, Transpennine in the 2010s, and perhaps now they'd be completing most remaining mainline infills.
I had a look at some of the other Q&A's around that point and very disappointed to see that Peter Hendy apparently believes the unelectrified Bath and Temple Mills branches are satisfactory and that discontinuous electrification is the right answer to EWR.
By contrast, I'm impressed about how switched on these random MPs are about this stuff.
Well this is the kind of rationale government and, then by command, industry seem to be taking - I think it's somewhat short sighted. In my view most of the benefits of electric traction start to be whittled away when it turns from electrification infrastructure feeding trains to trains carrying their own power source. What remains is tailpipe emissions and potentially acceleration rate.
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I do think that this might somewhat be a failing of climate policy at the higher levels. Because if you have a singular view that a diesel engine producing carbon emissions is the Most Important thing to stop doing then you end up with batteries because it's a one-to-one switch and so conceptually simple. But, in my view, an effective climate policy is one that realises more people and goods need to be on rails than inside cars and trucks. As we all know, a diesel train (goods or passenger) is a much more efficient use of energy and resources and much less polluting than the equivalent road haulage. But obviously the railway needs to massively increase its capacity in all facets in order for roads to be used less. This is where electrification comes in because it makes the railway system be able to unlock a lot more performance out of the railways that are currently existing.
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In my view, railway electrification has little to do with removing diesel engines on trains - and is much more to do with utilising as much as we can from railway right-of-ways in the most resource and energy efficient manor. (Obviously we need many new miles of track but I more mean getting the most out of what we have at the moment - and I do accept that just electrifying everything won't create the capacity needed). The biggest evidence for this is that railways around the world willingly chose to electrify themselves since the late 1800s with no interest in greenhouse emissions. Apart from in North America for some reason, this remained the case even when diesel traction was a viable option.
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I think it's important to view railway decarbonisation in this way (in order to be able to use roads less) because if we view it as "wanting not to use diesel engines", detractors can quite rightfully point out that we're proposing to spend billions of pounds on reducing the already minimal emissions of a sector (rail transport) that pollutes the least out of all the modes of medium to long distance transport. From that perspective it seems ludicrous to spend anything on railway electrification given the fast approaching climate deadlines.
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In their public messaging, modern electrification schemes lean heavily into their lack of tailpipe emissions which may be a savvy PR move but I think it's overdone and leaves a ever growing rhetorical flank exposed. Someone looking at transport overall would say, "who's emitting the most - it's cars" and therefore any money spent on decarbonisation should be on EVs, planes and ships in that order. The large capital expenditure on railway electrification achieves negligible CO2 *savings* (on present day carbon emissions) compared to provisioning charging infrastructure for EVs for the same amount of money. I don't believe that it is possible or beneficial to even try solving transport emissions by electrifying cars - instead we must use cars/trucks less and move goods and passengers around more by rail. Railway electrification is important to improving railway services in the same way that re-signalling, junction remodelling, four tracking, HSR, new stations, and new lines are - they allow more people and things to use trains more often.
This is true if we view railway electrification as removing diesel engines from trains. But I think it's much bigger than that. The whole reason electric railways are better is because the power source is not on the train - meaning the power source can be as big as you like (the electricity generation capacity of a country for instance) but the train can remain as light as thimble. This is what I keep going on about with energy efficiency. The train can pull much heavier loads and much faster speeds with much better acceleration (crucial for timetabling) without having to store that energy on-board in the form of diesel or batteries. This is basically why Victorians kept trying to build cable railways and vacuum suction railways - it's always better if you don't have to haul around your own power plant.
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This means that the energy the railway is using is going directly into the hauling of passengers and goods in question rather then getting wasted hauling the capacity to haul itself and its load. In that context, electrification feels a bit like cheating and tbf no other mode of transport (except for trolley buses and sail boats i guess) can actually do that - but then again electricity is basically magic. While we're at it, batteries are less energy dense than diesel so this problem compounds a lot quicker for battery traction. While it may be true that batteries may be better in thirty years, they also may not be and what's more we have the solution already tried and tested and ready to be deployed right now.
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My perspective on this comes from trying to assess the whole picture. A few batteries where they are really needed is acceptable (so shunting freight wagons under container cranes) but I think it's a bad idea when it starts becoming the default for rail upgrades going forward because at scale it brings almost none of the benefits of proper electrification. These are: lower track maintenance requirements (lightweight trains), better rolling stock reliability, fleet unity, cheaper trains, better acceleration meaning more services can be ran with more resilience, and the main one - whole system energy efficiency. All of this applies to diesel Bimode trains as well. In my view there is not much difference between diesel bimode and battery bimode except that the battery option might actually be worse because a battery has much less range and power available than an equivalent diesel engine. Idling engines in stations is a problem worth addressing in the immediate term - so i'm not advocating for more DMUs here!
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I think EWR have made the best decision they could (and are not hostages to fortune over what may be decided, and when, about electrification from Didcot to Oxford).
Btw they haven't actually made the decision yet. Their provisional planning permission (draft order limit) allows for full electrification. They will make their decision on discontinuous or full electrification after this round of consultation ends (Jan 25th). So it's a good idea to write in to their consultation and make the case for full electrification at the moment. (For sure, the detractors will trying their best to get whole plan cancelled in their responses to that atm). Anyone can write in even if they don't live there because it's significant to the whole railway network. It's important to say anything positive about the idea in these consultations because it's normally only the enraged that take the time to comment.
Totally agree with you on most of this @GraphitProjekt - especially the idea of a new line (EWR) being built without electrification which is totally bonkers. Short sightedness in national projects seems to be a British speciality.
There is one aspect however where I think discontinuous electrification makes sense. We have a very old network, and there are areas where the cost to install OHLE would be insanely high. A good example of where a battery/electric hybrid does make sense is the scheme in the Welsh Valleys. Electrifying old Victorian tunnels just isn't feasible if there isn't the gauge clearance necessary.
I do think bi-modes have their uses too, but they should absolutely not be a replacement for actual electrification. They're very useful for cascading out, and I think that in continuous electrification, you start completing lines like the GWML to Bristol, Swansea, and Oxford, and then cascade those 800s out to (for example) Cross-Country, to use on partially electrified lines (as countless people on here have been suggesting for years). Alternatively, you can also remove the diesel engines and convert them to 801s.
many people thought that the cancellation, or more accurately, the truncation of electrification would lead to a disaster.
In fact, it may turn out to be the best thing ever, since it has forced train manufacturers to invest in and develop bi-modes, tri-modes and hybrids
This will lead to solutions that can cover the entire network, whether through battery operation, bi-mode operation, or discontinuous electrification
It's all very well making the correct noises about "rolling programmes" and such, but this enthusiasm is based on the idea that it can actually deliver what is promised.
But the onus will be back on the railway to get costs for electrification under control.
This is probably the railway's last chance to obtain significant further electrification before car electrification becomes a serious political problem for it.
All of which can be covered with a single standard tri-mode design of EMU, with a battery big enough to accelerate the train up to line speed two or three times times, and a small diesel engine.
Here in the Fens we benefitted hugely from the electrifications of the 1980s and 1990s, notably Royston-Cambridge in 1988 and Cambridge-Kings Lynn in 1992. Both of these were "cheap and cheerful" schemes which got the wires up quickly without the need for expensive new infrastructure. The lack of new feeder stations was a big part of that, but meant restrictions on the number of trains that could be run, and everything had to be 4 cars only. Improvements to the electricity supply and longer trains came later, once the electric service had become established and produced rapid traffic growth.
That's in contrast to the last BR "gold plated" electrification to Royston, completed in 1978, having been planned nearly 20 years earlier.
I see discontinuous electrification as the 21st century equivalent of the "cheap and cheerful" approach that served so well in the 1980s and 1990s. I am quite content for East West Rail to have discontinuous electrification, because it means that we will get trains to Cambridge more quickly, rather than possibly dying in a ditch through insisting on having wires all the way. In particular, in discontinuous electrification it is the easiest and cheapest bits that get wired, and the most difficult and expensive bits are what gets left out. From what I've read here, 50/50 electrification is already feasible for bimode electric/battery trains: the costs of 50/50 electrification, and the time taken to do it, can be cut by more than half, compared with doing everything.
I suspect that if EWR goes for discontinuous electrification, then, once it gets started nobody will be much worried about filling in the missing bits. That's because battery technology will probably have made further advances in the meantime.
What I've said here applies for railways that are all or mostly passenger traffic. For routes heavily utilised by freight the considerations are different. If an east to north curve at Bletchley ever happened, with lots of container trains to/from Felixstowe going via EWR, that would be the time to fill in the missing bits.
There are reasons to be optimistic about future electrification from reading this https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/15124/pdf/ Peter Hendy and Alex Hynes mentioned the importance of a rolling programme to ensure cost effectiveness and a steady work stream for the supply chain and work teams. They implied that the government understand this and it should be a key mission of Great British Railways. I can understand other forum members being sceptical about discontinuous electrification but surely discontinuous is better than not electrifying a route, and is a basis for further electrification. Until a few weeks ago it seemed East West Rail would be a diesel railway. Now they've announced a preference for discontinuous electrification people are disappointed because it's not full electrification. Given the financial situation and justified suspicion in government about infrastructure scheme costs, I think EWR have made the best decision they could (and are not hostages to fortune over what may be decided, and when, about electrification from Didcot to Oxford).
The relevance of this to Midland Main Line electrification is that if electrification north from Wigston is not announced next year it will make Hendy's, Hynes' and others upbeat comments about electrification seem very hollow. As I said in post #7783 further MML electrification is going to be essential for BEMU operation of many regional services. It is concerning that projects of this kind go through endless reevaluations and reviews with every change of government, even changes of minister. British Rail's electrification projects in the 1970s, West Coast Crewe-Glasgow, Great Northern Kings Cross-Royston, survived changes of government and very tight public spending controls.
Pity that Peter Hendy didn't give a more honest answer to the committee question about why Britain is slow to electrify. He focussed on costs, but really it's about privatisation and the lost decades of long term vision and planning for the railways that Railtrack never had, and Network Rail took a while to find. British Rail electrified steadily, and if given the opportunity to carry on, we would likely have had Great Western electrification in the 1990s, MML in the 2000s, Transpennine in the 2010s, and perhaps now they'd be completing most remaining mainline infills.
I think you are coming at this with a rail engineering perspective.
1: If you look at the roads they are congested, this shows that there is pent up demand. If somebody or some item is taken by rail what will happen is that another car or lorry journey will take it's place. That is itself not a bad thing because the other word for this additional journey is economic growth. Ergo the principle argument for increasing rail is one of economic growth not about reduction of road traffic. In terms of capacity rail carries about 1/10th the number of passenger km as road so even massive increases in rail traffic would barely be felt in on the roads even if they did result in a 1-1 reduction in road transport. The ultimate solution to car traffic is likely road pricing, the key to making that socially acceptable is autonomous taxis.
2: The mass of batteries in a train is not significant; I did some calcs last year around what performance you could reasonably get out of a 800 with the mass of it's diesels and their fuel swapped over to a current state of the art LFP car battery pack. Such a train could run the cross country route from Penzance with the existing electrification that is on the route and some in station chargers. This also assumes that an 800 represents the last word in aero-dynamic efficiency which it most certainly doesn't. We don't really need advances in battery technology we just need ground up designs, not hanging hand me down battery packs on outdated old trains.
There is massive scope to improve the aero-dynamics of trains and their mass, Siemens have managed to take 30% off the drag off a Velaro (which is already probably lower drag than anything on UK rails) with the Velaro Novo. They also plan to take 69 tonnes off the mass of the train or 15% in total. If you use a battery pack as a structural member you can normally delete structure in the region of 15% of it's mass. An aerodynamic rail vehicle with 17.5% of its mass in a modern LFP battery pack would be able to go hundreds of miles off wire. At currently battery prices we are talking about adding 1-2% more the price of the train by adding a battery.
3: If acceleration was a problem for battery vehicles Tesla wouldn't be able to sell you a 5 door hatchback which can drag race an F1 car. In fact the battery pack in that class 800 example could supply about 16MW of energy (21MW for 9 car), far more than the train can get via the OHLE. Ergo we should actually use batteries on fully electrified high speed lines to allow the trains to accelerate faster without needing to size the OHLE for more than the average power of the train.
To actually get some of this to happen GBR needs to rapidly upskill and start asking if high speed trains can accelerate ~3 times faster than today what does that allow me to do? I think the answer is functionally a high speed metro service that covers the UK, if you granted property uplift value to the rail service it would self fund too.
3: If acceleration was a problem for battery vehicles Tesla wouldn't be able to sell you a 5 door hatchback which can drag race an F1 car. In fact the battery pack in that class 800 example could supply about 16MW of energy (21MW for 9 car), far more than the train can get via the OHLE. Ergo we should actually use batteries on fully electrified high speed lines to allow the trains to accelerate faster without needing to size the OHLE for more than the average power of the train.
I believe there are more factors than just OHLE limits limiting power output - see for instance the use of "slugs" with diesel-electric locomotives in America because when starting the electric generators produce more electricity than can actually be used by a single locomotive's motors.
Discontinuous electrification is definitely something that should be part of future schemes. I'm not saying all future schemes should be discontinuous but that it will allow faster changes to electric operations at much lower cost and over wider areas.
For example the Windermere branch could be electrified now at no infrastructure cost by simply procuring a BEMU.
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BEMU'S allow you to expand areas covered by any future electrification scheme which should increase the BCR.
I'm fairly sure that about half the cost of electrification is actually the civils work on bridges etc so if that cost can be reduced or eliminated then that has to be a good thing. Batteries are only going to improve in the future
A lot of it has already been spent, clearance works, raising Corsham aqueduct, lowering track through Box tunnel etc. A number of masts, and bigger number of bases already installed (without wires)
Whilst having battery trains on branches and services with one or two trains might make sense, somewhere like Bathampton Junction-Bristol sees 5-6 trains each way every hour (the sixth being freight), not to mention large number of freights in early hours of every Monday (when line via Swindon is usually closed overnight for maintenance)
Good example. The cost of wiring up Chippenham - Bristol will be in the region of £2-300m
Playing devil’s advocate, we know that Hitachi have proved battery techonology on the 800 series trains, therefore it would seem possible to equip, say, a third or half of the fleet with batteries in place of their generator sets to operate the Bristol and Seansea services. If you can do that for less than £200m (and I rather think you can) then you have electric services for cheaper, no ?
Are we talking of first costs or life costs?
Also synergy? - batteries only drive the trains under which they are mounted - not the crowded 2 car stopper in front.
Are we looking at partial benefits - wouldn't wiring through the (now cleared) Box tunnel with its long drag, help the economics of batteries along the flatter slower route from Bathampton to Bristol?
Aren't batteries in many cases a (necessary even if costlier) intermediate solution? - as wiring even viable routes is 1 - 2 generations away (thanks to HS2).
Costs above are up front, but there’s no dount that the incremental cost of operating and maintaing a fleet of battery train is somewhat lower than the costs of operating and maintaining a decent stretch of OLE. (I’ve done the latter, albeit not the former).
Costs above are up front, but there’s no doubt that the incremental cost of operating and maintaing a fleet of battery train is somewhat lower than the costs of operating and maintaining decent stretched of OLE. (I’ve done the latter, albeit not the former).
Costs above are up front, but there’s no dount that the incremental cost of operating and maintaing a fleet of battery train is somewhat lower than the costs of operating and maintaining decent stretched of OLE. (I’ve done the latter, albeit not the former).
No one has maintained a fleet of battery trains in the UK as yet so it's all unknown, we know the cost of OLE and running EMU's and the availability and reliability to be expected but we have none of that for BEMU's as yet. The manufactures will make claims but they will sell their grannies to get an order so their figures are fiction until proven in service. When the 14x fleets came in it was said "you will never see these in the shed", they were never out of the shed for long.
No one has maintained a fleet of battery trains in the UK as yet so it's all unknown, we know the cost of OLE and running EMU's and the availability and reliability to be expected but we have none of that for BEMU's as yet. The manufactures will make claims but they will sell their grannies to get an order so their figures are fiction until proven in service. When the 14x fleets came in it was said "you will never see these in the shed", they were never out of the shed for long.
Battery trains have been in service in both Japan and South Korea for around a decade. Also in Germany for the last couple of years.
The extra maintenance costs of the batteries and associated systems will be far less than the cost of maintaining miles of OHLE and associated equipment.
Upfront capital costs will also be substantially lower.
The worst case is the battery trains don't work properly, at which point we are (at most) out the cost of new trains. We will have to pay for the extra electrification, but that cost would have had to have been paid anyway if it wasn't tried.
The cost of rolling stock is way lower than the cost of 25kV electrification for the same route.
The risk and reward are wildly different in magnitude.
Battery trains have been in service in both Japan and South Korea for around a decade. Also in Germany for the last couple of years.
The extra maintenance costs of the batteries and associated systems will be far less than the cost of maintaining miles of OHLE and associated equipment.
Upfront capital costs will also be substantially lower.
So not in this country then, it's always figures from other countries we get quoted. The figures for new electrification are cheaper abroad than the UK ones and I guess the same for build high speed railways too.
So not in this country then, it's always figures from other countries we get quoted. The figures for new electrification are cheaper abroad than the UK ones and I guess the same for build high speed railways too.
So not in this country then, it's always figures from other countries we get quoted. The figures for new electrification are cheaper abroad than the UK ones and I guess the same for build high speed railways too.
The point is the costs quoted are not based on real service experience in the UK unlike those for EMU's, as such they need to be treated as provisional and not just taken as reality because that's what happens elsewhere.
Except ‘we‘ do know. We know the costs of maintaing the traction battery systems on the 777s and Birmingham trams, and we know the cost of maintaining the (non traction) batteries systems installed on every EMU, including the extra large versions on Lumo’s 803s. And we know the firm prices quoted for maintenance by manufacturers in their service agreements. It’s just a question of scale.
If we proceeded on the basis of only using things we know about, the human race would still be in caves.
It's not just lowest cost that counts; it's also the benefits/revenue that that option can achieve. A Pacer service would be even cheaper than a BEMU but could it win custom?
If a BEMU is always to be proven cheaper than an EMU at any scale of operation and can equal its performance from a customer point of view then there's been no point in electrification for a number of years past.
Why did Hitachi, IIRC, install small diesel alternators in 80x's, in preference to batteries for emergency ETS?
If you are at loose end over Christmas, then here's a holiday activity.
The costs of electrification are in proportion to the extra track miles (TM) sparked, whereas the benefits are in proportion to the number of 20m cars (C) needed for the service. By finding the ratio of TM/C, for existing or your pet schemes, you will gain an idea of the relative attraction of electrification - high is bad, low is good! You can estimate the track miles/km from route length etc and add c5% for sidings etc. You could even make a family party game out of it, with a BEMU token as the trump card!
Because the necessary batteries weren't proven at the time the contract was awarded - some of the later electric 80x units do have have emergency batteries.
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