Third rail is old fashioned and should be done away with

[RobShipway]

Getting to Cheltenham gets you almost as far as you need to go, because the Birmingham-Bromsgrove line is electrified, you only need around ~325km of reliable battery range to do Plymouth to Birmingham, even if you take no credit for the few kilometres you spend under electrification near Bristol Parkway.

I was working on the basis, that you would get little or no charge if time was spent under electrification at Bristol Parkway. Hence, why I said battery power to Cheltenham.

400 miles on battery would be good, but being able to travel 1000 - 2000 miles on battery power at 100mph - 125mph would be better. From my little experience with EV cars, the more time that you do over 30 - 40mph, the more battery power that you lose. Yes, using regenerative braking helps to put power back into the batteries, but I am still not convinced that within the next 6 - 20 years that we will have trains that will be able to travel from Penzance to Edingburgh on non electrified sections of track doing 100 - 125mph for a constant time without the need to stop where there is OHL for a few hours, before travelling on.

I thought only the slow lines were electrified from Longbridge to Kings Norton?

The Cross City Line line is electrified from Bromsgrove, however as you state only the slow lines are electrified Longbridge to King's Norton, unless at some point the fast lines get electrified as well then any BEMU train would either be having to use the slow lines to get to Birmingham New Street behind a cross city service or be able to have enough battery power to motor at up to the linespeed of the fast lines in that section.

 

[The Ham]

Getting to Cheltenham gets you almost as far as you need to go, because the Birmingham-Bromsgrove line is electrified, you only need around ~325km of reliable battery range to do Plymouth to Birmingham, even if you take no credit for the few kilometres you spend under electrification near Bristol Parkway.

For that to work out would mean no XC services could work running into Cornwall.

It's another reason why you'd probably want, to ensure you could run a reliable service, electrification between Exeter and Plymouth. Likewise, a section of electrification around Truro could be fairly useful given the fairly frequent service on the line to Falmouth, as otherwise any line side batteries would have a very limited time to charge between trains and limited numbers of platforms (Truro has 3 and the Falmouth stations have one), so keeping a train sat there for longer than until the next service arrived probably isn't viable.

Even if sitting trains for a time was viable, that increases your lease costs. At (say) £200,000 per coach, per year, over a 20 year period and an extra (say) 30 coaches you could run (assuming £5 million stkm) 24km of wires. Whilst that's not all that much distance, there's other coats (given energy costs, line side batteries, more platforms, etc.), so further km could likely be added. Also, the cost savings could be delivered on existing trains, so no need to

However, as you've pointed out, that would only work if you brought all new, designed from the ground up BEMU's. Realistically, we've got about 15 years before the 22x's become life expired, so they may be viable to be replaced with such a train (but only if we lock us into using them in diesel until then).

Likewise, we've go about 23 years until the 80x's come off lease, so again more wires would benefit them as well. Unless we are going to pay a lease in trains we're not using (which would cover the curry if yet more wires).