this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
35 points (97.3% liked)
Trains
841 readers
1 users here now
Everything about trains and railroads
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Batteries might work on short, infrequent, local lines. But any long distance route should have wire put in, it saves significant costs over diesel or batter operation, and as soon as a service becomes decently frequent (every hour or whatever) electrification makes more sense form an economic and environmental perspective.
This is inaccurate for the UK. A lot of the lines have tunnels (e.g. along to Holyhead) or have geography (e.g. CVL) or planning issues that makes electrification of the whole line much more expensive. By contrast, if you have bi or trimodal trains you can electrify the easy parts while avoiding the high cost parts, which means you can roll out the electrification of the easy bits so much quicker.
Right, but the fact that most services where this is applicable will not be frequent such as in Canada, parts of the US, rural EU/UK, and elsewhere in the world, though winter performance may still need significant improvements.
Some trains already operate on hybrid power where the diesel-electric generator gives power where there are no wires and then switches to fully electric where there are. A sufficiently capable battery would just be a variation of that, and be relatively easy to implement, instead of or alongside with track electrification.
Also means you can get some of the merseyrail services running all the way to Crewe, meaning fewer changes and better connectivity (though now HS2 is cancelled, how much benefit that will actually bring is in question).