What I think is wrong with current OHLE electrification practice

[Nottingham59]

This is a new thread to answer the following question by @Class15 in the EWR Countdown discussion.

Genuine question for you here, and not only about this post: why are you so anti-electrification?

Well, that's a good question. After thinking about it for a while, I'd say there are six reasons, but not necessarily in this order:

1. At £3-5 million per stk, 25kV OHLE is grossly expensive and the railway industry doesn't seem capable of reducing that cost. I've not seen any business cases for electrification that make economic sense - even if you allow 60 years to recoup that investment.
2. The technology of overhead wires is rapidly being overtaken by advances in battery technology. It seems clear to me that in ten years time, continuous electrification by OHLE will be seen as an expensive mistake. Yet we taxpayers will still be paying interest for decades on the extra national debt incurred to pay for those stranded assets.
3. Installing OHLE this decade uses up resources in the National Grid that should be directed at providing connections for BESS grid batteries and transmission capacity to allow faster roll out of renewable resources. That's the fastest route to decarbonisation.
4. Current electrification practice results in grossly overspecified kit. One example is Braybrooke grid feeder: the capacity of the two 80 MVA grid circuits exceed the total power uptake of all EMRs 810s (33 x 3MW) plus all their 360s (21 x 1.5MW), all accelerating at full throttle simultaneously and all taking their power only from Braybrooke. The second grid transformer at Braybrooke is a complete waste, given that the only trains passing it will be diesel bimodes with built-in [N-1] redundancy.
5. Current projects are putting wires and grid connections in the wrong place. Today's priority should be grid connections to the WCML north of Crewe, and the ECML in Northumberland, where those connections are needed today. New electrification projects should be directed to places like Exeter and Inverness, where they will be needed in future, rather than places like Tweedbank, which is well within the round-trip range of battery EMUs that could and should be ordered today.
6. I'm not against electrification as such, just the way it is being done now. I do support the plans to electrify the routes to Saltburn and Hull with overhead recharging of BEMUs at the terminal stations, with battery boost to reduce the cost of the grid connections there.

 

[The exile]

1. Current projects are putting wires and grid connections in the wrong place. Today's priority should be grid connections to the WCML north of Crewe, and the ECML in Northumberland, where those connections are needed today. New electrification projects should be directed to places like Exeter and Inverness, where they will be needed in future, rather than places like Tweedbank, which is well within the round-trip range of battery EMUs that could and should be ordered today

ECML to Tweedbank and back on a freezing winter’s day when you’ve got to allow for keeping passengers warm during a lengthy delay and still have enough power to get back would be pushing it, for a start. And don’t forget lead times - we’re re not starting from “today” but from several years ago and to renege on construction contracts is an expensive folly.

 

[Class15]

Okay, I think this is pretty fair overall - but I do have a couple of further questions?

1. would you de-electrify routes?
2. would you electrify short sections like Didcot - Oxford which would enable better use of existing stock?
3. why not try and find a way of cutting OHLE costs - as you say the GWML kit in particular is completely over specced but other European countries manage it!

 

[mmh]

why not try and find a way of cutting OHLE costs - as you say the GWML kit in particular is completely over specced but other European countries manage it!

France and Germany are probably comparable to us with mixed electric / diesel networks, are they electrifying large amounts of their diesel routes? (I have no idea!)

 

[Peter Sarf]

I will throw this in.

Are the railways in the UK a significant producer of Carbon emissions and other Pollution ?.
I fear that too much money is being spent on electrification than it should because of cost overruns.
But would the money be better spent on de-carbonising other parts of the UK economy ?.

 

[The exile]

France and Germany are probably comparable to us with mixed electric / diesel networks, are they electrifying large amounts of their diesel routes? (I have no idea!)

Germany is (not that there are many significant ones left)

 

[Sorcerer]

Electrification probably wouldn't be as expensive as it is now if we had treated it as a rolling programme rather than a series of big individual railway projects. The Midland Main Line and Great Western Main Line electrification were scrapped with the belief bi-modes would fill the gap, but the problem now is reviving these projects would be more costly in the long-term, but as is typically the case with UK governance, the short-term is what typically matters.

 

[The Pelican]

It's worth remembring that the GWEP, NWEP and Edinburgh-Glasgow electrification were all forced to adopt more stringent safety standards during construction, despite British overhead electrified railways being very safe. These alterations will have really damaged electrification's cost effectiveness.

 

[HSTEd]

2. would you electrify short sections like Didcot - Oxford which would enable better use of existing stock?

At ~£2m per rail vehicle and £2.5m-£4m per track kilometre, its not going to take much electrification before buying new stock is cheaper!
Optimising to conserve comparatively cheap trains with comparatively expensive infrastructure may end up being a false economy.

3. why not try and find a way of cutting OHLE costs - as you say the GWML kit in particular is completely over specced but other European countries manage it!

The problem I see with this argument is that doing this is normally considered to require a years long "rolling" programme amounting to thousands of track kilometres before it can achieve cost savings.

It's effectively a multi billion pound gamble that they can make electrification cheap at some point in the future, but only by doing several thousand track kilometres of expensive electrification - which is probably more electrification than would be necessary to achieve total decarbonisation with available battery train technology.

 

[quantinghome]

I will throw this in.

Are the railways in the UK a significant producer of Carbon emissions and other Pollution ?.
I fear that too much money is being spent on electrification than it should because of cost overruns.
But would the money be better spent on de-carbonising other parts of the UK economy ?.

Carbon emissions from rail are tiny in comparison to road. Around 80% of passenger-km are already run with electric trains and the remain diesel operation has a pretty low carbon footprint per passenger as it's a far more energy-efficient means of transport. As a result rail counts for around 1% of transport-related CO2-equivalent emissions in the UK.

However, there are other reasons to move away from fossil fuels - we can't have our network dependent on imports and batteries + OHL are mechanically simpler and therefore more reliable (all other things being equal).

 

[AlastairFraser]

At ~£2m per rail vehicle and £2.5m-£4m per track kilometre, its not going to take much electrification before buying new stock is cheaper!
Optimising to conserve comparatively cheap trains with comparatively expensive infrastructure may end up being a false economy.

Except in that case, extending electrification from Didcot to Oxford permits operational simplicity of operating a through service that is 70+% under the wires already (especially when freight can use those wires to help decarbonise - I can't see locos with long distance battery and OHLE capability becoming particularly popular).

We should have never have scrapped the Electric Spine project, apart from the Basingstoke to Southampton conversion, which can easily be replaced with dual-mode locos instead.

Even just approx. 73 miles Didcot to Nuneaton and 14 miles Southcote Junction to Basingstoke would allow a fully electrified route (bar the Docks themselves) all the way from Southampton Docks to the WCML/GWML avoiding London, not to mention the benefits for Cross Country's route strategy and GWR/Chiltern/West Mids Railway too.
This may not be the case for e.g. Cross Country regional services Birmingham to Stansted, where large swathes are unelectrified and the stock will need replacement at some point anyway.

 

[HSTEd]

Except in that case, extending electrification from Didcot to Oxford permits operational simplicity of operating a through service that is 70+% under the wires already (especially when freight can use those wires to help decarbonise - I can't see locos with long distance battery and OHLE capability becoming particularly popular).

If the freights are not going to have long distance batteries, then I'm not sure what electrifying from Didcot to Oxford would achieve for freight operators beyond marginal reductions in diesel use.
The primary reason that there is limited through service on the Didcot-Oxford route is because the railway industry has failed to order suitable rolling stock. Possibly they believed that electrification was imminent, but that no longer seems to be the case. It wouldn't take many vehicles to run the hourly Didcot-Oxford service as a battery train from Paddington.

If the freight industry truly wants to take the political risk of sticking with diesel in an environment where road transport has gone electric, as it will comparatively soon, then that should be on them. Spending billions on infrastructure electrification so they can avoid batteries is probably not a great way to spend public money!

Even just approx. 73 miles Didcot to Nuneaton and 14 miles Southcote Junction to Basingstoke would allow a fully electrified route (bar the Docks themselves) all the way from Southampton Docks to the WCML/GWML avoiding London, not to mention the benefits for Cross Country's route strategy and GWR/Chiltern/West Mids Railway too.
This may not be the case for e.g. Cross Country regional services Birmingham to Stansted, where large swathes are unelectrified and the stock will need replacement at some point anyway.

87 route miles on a twin track railway is something like 280 track kilometres. Which is going to be £700m-£1.2bn or so the way 25kV projects are going.

It's an awful lot of money. We could probably run the development programme and the procurement of quite a few long range battery electric locomotives and give them to the freight operators for that much!

 

[td97]

After thinking about it for a while, I'd say there are six reasons

Don't forget the industry is hopeless at actually using the few electrification schemes that are actually built.
See the £100m Wigan to Lostock electrification which is currently a complete waste of taxpayer money. For a period of 2 years (authorisation in 07/2025, until it supposedly gets used by EMUs in 05/2027), it will receive the exact same toxic mix of unreliable 769s and short-formed diesel Sprinter stock for 6 days per week, whilst a Sabbath day is observed on Sundays.
Also of worthy mention is the Preston to Manchester electrification which has seen 3tph EMU since entry into service in 2018 (Manchester Victoria to Preston service was removed around 2020, and the TPE Scotland service was redirected this way around this same time).
Manchester Victoria was electrified in 2015, and only used to have the peak extra Chat Moss stopping services served by EMUs.
Today Stalybridge station sees less than 1tph BMMU, whilst the TPE bi-modes undergo power changeover miles outside of the station limits.

No sane politician or civil servant would approve more of the above