Global Warming - Time to Crack on with Electrification?

Many thanks everyone for your comments thus far. Electrifying the railways is not just about using a more efficient form of propulsion and doing our bit regarding global warming, it is also about cleaning the air we breathe. Train dispatchers working on platforms with diesel trains would be at a greater health risk than those at electrified stations - same applies to everyone else of course - including passengers.

I see that Bristol Temple Meads recently had the canopy renovated; it is such a shame that this station still has all its trains banging out diesel fumes to pollute the new roof. Of course, such fumes are trapped under the canopy to a certain degree thus posing a health risk to staff & passengers alike. Presumably someone has actually measured the pollution at Temple Meads?

I note that central Bristol is now has signs on the approach roads regarding a fine for polluting cars entering the city and a system of number plate recognition. A pity that no plans exist to electrify the trains that go through Bristol even though it is obvious that all the Cross Country fleet plus the GWR trains (apart from Class 800’s) will need to be replaced - or even should have been replaced by now.

Envoy said:

Many thanks everyone for your comments thus far. Electrifying the railways is not just about using a more efficient form of propulsion and doing our bit regarding global warming, it is also about cleaning the air we breathe. Train dispatchers working on platforms with diesel trains would be at a greater health risk than those at electrified stations - same applies to everyone else of course - including passengers.

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Making the train a more pleasant option is a good idea, absolutely. I think the most realistic option is combining BEMU operation with targeted electrification. I just wish we actually got on with that.

Envoy said:

I see that Bristol Temple Meads recently had the canopy renovated; it is such a shame that this station still has all its trains banging out diesel fumes to pollute the new roof. Of course, such fumes are trapped under the canopy to a certain degree thus posing a health risk to staff & passengers alike. Presumably someone has actually measured the pollution at Temple Meads?

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Someone probably has checked air quality at temple meads, but if it's of interest to you, it's relatively easy to measure air quality yourself. My city council gave out portable air quality monitors (the model was atmotube), you could check with your council whether such a scheme is available. I found it really interesting to see where I am exposed to bad air quality! If your council does not offer that, you could purchase one yourself, or for a lower budget option, purchase a USB-powered air quality monitor (IKEA offers a good value one), and power it with a powerbank.

Envoy said:

I note that central Bristol is now has signs on the approach roads regarding a fine for polluting cars entering the city and a system of number plate recognition. A pity that no plans exist to electrify the trains that go through Bristol even though it is obvious that all the Cross Country fleet plus the GWR trains (apart from Class 800’s) will need to be replaced - or even should have been replaced by now.

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All agreed here!

HSTEd said:

The window for extensive electrification has, I think closed.

Battery systems are now good enough that the "neutral sections" can be tens of kilometres long, at which point I'm not sure how much additional electrification we would actually need. Some certainly, but not enough to justify an enormous rolling programme.

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Battery sections could now be hundreds of kilometres long. And as current improvements in battery technology are deployed in EVs, range and charging speed are only going to increase. If Ember can run electric coaches from Inverness to Wick, then the railway could batterify every line in the country.

HSTEd said:

The railway has repeatedly failed to deliver electrification at a reasonable cost, and I don't think its reasonable to expect the government to keep trying endlessly.

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The railway has repeated failed to deliver a railway at reasonable cost, but that's probably a topic for another thread.

HSTEd said:

Some short amounts of electrification in places like Sheffield, Plymouth and elsewhere to enable battery operations will be required, but beyond that I would not expect much else.

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Yes. All future electrification really should assume that it will be used primarily to recharge battery trains. That means sections of route that carry 7tph or more; stations where services regulary terminate; and a few selected points where trains can recharge on the go.


EDIT:
Ember's Yutong T14E coaches run the 450km round trip from Edinburgh to Aberdeen via Dundee and back again on a single charge. See at 2m30s, in this video by Ember:
If road based passenger EVs can run 450km in Scotland between charges "even in winter conditions in relative comfort", then rail-based passenger BEMUs should be able to go even further between charging points.

Nottingham59 said:

Yes. All future electrification really should assume that it will be used primarily to recharge battery trains. That means sections of route that carry 7tph or more; stations where services regulary terminate; and a few selected points where trains can recharge on the go.

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The most cost effective is to put wires up on plain track that can draw power from existing grid connections.

The railway will be in a long queue for new grid connections. Wiring big stations with complicated track layouts will take a lot of time, cost a lot of money, and cause lots of disruption.

Magdalia said:

The most cost effective is to put wires up on plain track that can draw power from existing grid connections.

The railway will be in a long queue for new grid connections. Wiring big stations with complicated track layouts will take a lot of time, cost a lot of money, and cause lots of disruption.

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For battery charging purposes, we care more about time trains spend under electrification than distance travelled. So the cost effective sections may not be where they would simplistically appear.

For example, 10 route kilometres or so from Saltash to the line adjacent to the Plymouth Laira depot would allow trains to charge for ~20 minutes even if they aren't terminating. Much (~15%) of that ten kilometres is single track. The section on the Royal Albert Bridge would be very expensive per metre, but probably not that expensive for seconds of charging provided per hour given that it is very slow and single track.

Station layouts might be complex, but they provide a lot of charging time per metre of work done, because trains tend to move slowly or remain stationary in stations.

EDIT: A 2 minute station stop is equivalent to ~10 track kilometres at 100mph.

Magdalia said:

The most cost effective is to put wires up on plain track

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Yes, if you measure cost effectiveness in terms of pounds per kilometre of electrified route.

But for recharging battery trains, the measure of cost effectiveness is pounds per minute spent in contact with the overhead wire. And those efficiencies come at station platforms, where a terminating train will typically have a 10 minute turnaround time and through trains may have a two minute dwell. And each bit of wire can be used by many different trains over the course of an hour.

Magdalia said:

that can draw power from existing grid connections.

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Yes, of course, but there are not many of those. In my part of the world, I can only think of

• Extending MML to Leicester and Syston, to use more of Braybrooke grid feeder
• Newark Castle and its turnback crossover, fed from the ECML
• Retford Low Level, again fed from the ECML
• Extending OHLE at Grantham towards Gonerby tunnel to give Skegness trains 15 minutes under the wires during their Grantham call.

Magdalia said:

The railway will be in a long queue for new grid connections.

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Yes. The railway currently specifies dual-circuit high power single phase takeoffs, which require feeds from 265kV or 400kV national grid circuits. These are incredibly expensive and slow. The prime example is Braybrooke with 2 x 80 MVA feeds, which is more than enough power by itself to drive all 33 of the 810s in the EMR fleet at full power (3MW) all day. That is a crazy level of over-provision.

The industry should be investigating battery boost for its grid connections, so that it only needed balanced and much smaller 3-phase supplies from DNO connections.

Magdalia said:

Wiring big stations with complicated track layouts will take a lot oftime, cost a lot of money, and cause lots of disruption.

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Hmm again. That's because you're not thinking battery. Stations like Nottingham or Sheffield can be fed by tramlines or conductor bars, like at St Pancras. Junctions and mid-platform crossovers can be served by non-conducting slider bars, just to keep pantographs pushed down. You don't need expensive and complex catenary systems with 15kN tension in the conductor wires at stations where all conceivable electric traction will be moving at slow speeds.

Nottingham station would need just seven conductor bars over the platform tracks, all of which would be 300m long or shorter. To minimise disruption, I would do the work one platform at a time, after building a new platform 8, which already has space provided.

EuxtonNeutral said:

SNIPPED

Also you have to factor in other negative externalities of road traffic vs rail: safety, noise pollution, hogging and diminishing the public realm etc.

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Against which you have to balance the £3,000 billion of the Gross Domestic Product which is only possible because all factories, offices, shops, houses, theatres, football stadiums, restaurants, pubs, national parks and so on are connected to each other by road.

The question becomes - are there any quick relatively cheap wins?

GRALISTAIR said:

The question becomes - are there any quick relatively cheap wins?

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Didcot to Oxford, once Botley is done.