7 ms·

Wouldn't it be cheaper in the long run, easier and more future proof to just electrify the damn track? The tracks themselves need maintenance anyways. Having ov

Wouldn't it be cheaper in the long run, easier and more future proof to just electrify the damn track? The tracks themselves need maintenance anyways. Having overhead electrified tracks allows you to make the electricity for it anyaway you want including hydrogen. You are also able to purchase practically any electric locomotive and the costs for those are much lower as well as maintenance.

joshlk 4y ago
Electrifying tracks can be more difficult than it first seems. For example in the UK on certain lines you have to replace most road bridges that go over the track. The bridges are not high enough to fit electric lines underneath. Tunnels can also have the same problem.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Some bridges and tunnels are also not electrified in Austria but electric trains still pass through them on their massive inertia alone. It's really not a big issue for trains.
  - pmyteh 4y ago
    They're doing that more here (putting neutral sections with reduced clearance under bridges) but it doesn't save everything. A major disadvantage of being early to the railway game is that we have amongst the most restrictive structure gauge in the world. It also turns out that we've repeatedly stopped and restarted our electrification campaign over the last hundred years, such that we have little persistent expertise and excessive costs per km. So it's not just tunnels and bridges.
- pmyteh 4y ago
  This. The capital costs are huge, such that it only makes marginal sense on a financial basis alone. You get further factoring in service improvements (lighter trains without diesel engines -> faster acceleration -> shorter journey tines), the societal benefits of decarbonisation, and electric trains breaking down less often, but that only moves the viable point so far. In the extreme case, a railway which is 200 miles long and takes 3 trains a day will never have a positive financial case for electrification. So once you've electrified all the stuff that should have been done decades ago (like main lines with 10 trains an hour) and then pushed on to the marginal stuff (hourly rural lines) there's still a small core of lines left. You could just bite the bullet and electrify them anyway, or you could go with things like battery electric trains (good for short distances off an electric mainline) or biodiesel/green hydrogen. The latter are likely to be cheaper.
  - Arnt 4y ago
    Worth testing, anyway, and this looks like a good place to test them. Hydrogen trains might make sense even if hydrogen cars don't, since the trains run on their tracks, according to a fixed timetable, and need little new infrastructure.
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      The issue with Hydrogen is its storage technology. It requires a high pressure (300-bar minimum, 700-bar ideal) environment... or cryogenics to store compact liquid hydrogen. Building a small, personal, car-tank that withstands 700-bar of pressure and survives typical car accidents is... really difficult? However, building a large train-tank that withstands a typical derailment is far easier. ------ I don't think Hydrogen will ever be useful for personal cars. The pressure requirements / storage requirements look rather insane. I know there's groups working with carbon-fiber designs and other advanced materials, but those are really expensive. Larger trains / trucks can just use standard steel to contain the Hydrogen at 700-bar of pressure (because a bigger tank is easier to scale).
      - Arnt 4y ago
        Oh, I thought distribution was the main issue. Trains needing only one supply point, as opposed to masses of gas stations along the roads. TIL.
        dragontamer 4y ago
        I mean, Toyota and Hyundai are making personal H2 vehicles. But they're expensive, very expensive, because those storage tanks are extremely sophisticated. Unless those storage tank costs come down by a LOT, I don't think H2 cars will compete reasonably against other technologies (Hybrid, PHEV, or EVs) ----- $50,000 for an H2 vehicle with only 180 horsepower engine is really meh.
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  As a reference point for just how expensive, the Caltrain electrification project in SF is currently estimated at $2.44 billion dollars for 82 km of track, and still climbing. And this is for what's almost a best-case infrastructurally: flat land, few bridges or overpasses, etc. (But, admittedly, what just might the world's worst regulatory environment.)
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    Midland Main Line in England "cost given as £1.3 billion pounds and also included three station modifications at Leicester, Derby and Sheffield. 422 single track miles of wiring was supposed to occur and a total of 120 bridges modified." So roughly 340km of double-track for $1.5bn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midland_Main_Line_railway_upgrade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midland_Main_Line_railway_upgr...
  - izacus 4y ago
    American overinflated public infrastructure estimates aren't very useful for comparisons with Germany however. With the numbers US planners are spewing out, we'd never have fast train network in Switzerland or high-speed rail across Italy, France or Spain.
  - MagnumOpus 4y ago
    $30 million per km (even if double-tracked) is exorbitant and can only be explained through entities who don't care spending Other People's Money. The UK government estimates £600k/track-km, so even in the US with high wages it should be doable at $2 million/km per track if budgeted carefully...
    - avn2109 4y ago
      Wait till you learn about the subways in NYC which they dig for comfortably over a billion dollars per mile...
  - zbrozek 4y ago
    It would be interesting to know what drives cost gaps versus other jurisdictions.
- jbu 4y ago
  If the train had enough battery to get through the tunnel, but was charged on the main line, that would work wouldn't it?
  - VaxWithSex 4y ago
    Yes and Deutsch Bahn is doing exactly this. Source: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/deutsche-bahn-siemens-wasserstoff-zug-brennstoffzelle-101.html https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/deutsche-bahn-siemens-w...
- danw1979 4y ago
  Anecdata: as a regular commuter on the east coast main line in the UK for several years, a very common source of service interruption was blamed on overhead cable problems. From an engineering perspective the complication of the track electrical infrastructure and pantograph seem inferior to a hydrogen tank and fuel cells. Far less actual stuff to build and maintain.
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    That line was electrified as cheaply as possible. It's not a problem elsewhere. http://www.rail.co.uk/rail-news/ecml-suffers-another-failure/ http://www.rail.co.uk/rail-news/ecml-suffers-another-failure...
  - VaxWithSex 4y ago
    Anecdata from Germany: that never happend to me. Mostly trees falling on the tracks.
  - pmyteh 4y ago
    The East Coast Main Line is prone to dewirement (where the pantograph comes off the catenary and normally gets tangled and brings down the wire) at an unusually high rate. The folk wisdom is that the use of wired headspans instead of rigid portals, combined with a long distance between stanchions, makes it fragile. I don't know the extent to which that's true. Set against that, the miles per technical incident for electric trains are about twice that for diesel, and a train breaking down on the ECML is also disruptive, if not obviously infrastructural...
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Batteries can get you through the places where its hard/costly to directly electrify. The two techs are complementary. You see this on tram systems where bridges or junctions conplicate the overhead wires.
Kelteseth 4y ago
This is what we currently do in Germany [1], but it takes years to do that. Simply changing the locomotive is easier. [1] https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/friedrichshafen/suedbahn-faehrt-jetzt-mit-strom-100.html https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/friedrichsh...
- VaxWithSex 4y ago
  Also here: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/deutsche-bahn-siemens-wasserstoff-zug-brennstoffzelle-101.html https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/deutsche-bahn-siemens-w...
Barrin92 4y ago
cheaper maybe, easier definitely but diversifying into new tech is worth it in and of itself, this is more of an experiment if anything given that it's only about a dozen trains. If we're learning one lesson right now in Germany it's probably that having some things not running on the electricity grid is potentially a good idea. Hydrogen is energy dense, burns clean and doesn't depend on any system infrastructure, which is pretty neat. I think it's underused still, afaik Japan is the only other place betting some money on it.
- sschueller 4y ago
  It still doesn't solve the issue when you have trains coming from countries like Switzerland which is 100% electrified and you loose tons time switching locomotives.
cultofmetatron 4y ago
I agree, and for areas without active electric, we could probably use some combination of batteries and super capacitors to push the train along till it gets back into electrified rail.
dragontamer 4y ago
Hydrogen has the benefits of delayed time-of-use. For example, nuclear power continues to create energy at night, at 2am when there aren't many trains running. In contrast, when an electric train pulls from the grid, it needs electricity immediately, no matter how loaded the grid is. Electric Trains running at 7pm (during the "Duck curve") will inevitably be powered by natural-gas peaker plants. --------- In contrast, Hydrogen electrolysis could continue into the night and be powered by "otherwise unused" 2am or 3am electricity from nuclear power. Even if the train was running at 7pm, the electricity comes from the most advantageous time throughout the day. That is to say: Hydrogen is a fuel, AND a battery, AND is compatible with electrification technologies thanks to the fuel cell.
- Kayou 4y ago
  In that case what prevents us from building energy storage facilities that produce hydrogen at night and release the electricity back into the grid during the day? Wouldn't it be more efficient than transporting the hydrogen by truck and transporting the hydrogen battery on every train?
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Yes. That would be a better idea.
    - morphle 4y ago
      but it would still be very much more expensive than just solar
      - dragontamer 4y ago
        Solar isn't even competing against Hydrogen. Hydrogen is a storage technology, not really an energy source. Hydrogen competes with Li-ion batteries. How many Li-ion batteries do you need to equal one 200-ton liquid H2 storage tank? At 120MJ per kg, 200-tons == 200,000 kg == 6GW-hrs of electricity. There's no Li-ion battery in the world that's anywhere close to that kind of storage capacity... and various researchers are aiming at 3000ton H2 storage tanks. Erase 50% or even 80% of the energy due to inefficiency / costs of cryogenics, and you still have a bigger energy storage tank from H2 than anything possible with Li-ion. And the future of H2 is looking like 10x capacities are reasonable over the next 10 years. ------- Whatever solar solution you were thinking, just do the same except instead of using big, expensive, heavy Li-ion batteries, replace the storage mechanism with H2 fuel cells.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
edpichler 4y ago
There are many challenges in this solution. I don't understand about trains but I imagine that doing maintenance in one electrified line would shut down or overload other parts of the network. Also, energy transported this way could be easily stolen, they just need to pull some wires and hide underground. Also, to transport energy cheaply in long distances you need a very high voltage, that would electrify anything that gets closer to the track. That is why you see high voltage cables being only used in very high poles.
- jonp888 4y ago
  > I don't understand about trains but I imagine that doing maintenance in one electrified line would shut down or overload other parts of the network. The track is divided into section, so you can turn off parts of it. It isn't one continous wire, there are unelectrified dividers. > Also, energy transported this way could be easily stolen, they just need to pull some wires and hide underground. The standard voltage used is 25000 volts. You can't 'just' use it, you need an entire electricity substation. > Also, to transport energy cheaply in long distances you need a very high voltage, that would electrify anything that gets closer to the track. That is why you see high voltage cables being only used in very high poles. About 3 metres clearance is needed to avoid arcing. Anything higher is mainly to stop something hitting it.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I thought I'd read that was the long term plan for this specific railway? Or maybe that was an Italian plan I was thinking of.
VaxWithSex 4y ago
Yes and Deutsche Bahn is planning on doing it for all tracks where this is commercially and technologically feasible. The remaining tracks will mostly be battery electric trains and hydrogen. Source: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/deutsche-bahn-siemens-wasserstoff-zug-brennstoffzelle-101.html https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/deutsche-bahn-siemens-w...

joshlk 4y ago

Electrifying tracks can be more difficult than it first seems. For example in the UK on certain lines you have to replace most road bridges that go over the track. The bridges are not high enough to fit electric lines underneath. Tunnels can also have the same problem.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Some bridges and tunnels are also not electrified in Austria but electric trains still pass through them on their massive inertia alone. It's really not a big issue for trains.
- pmyteh 4y ago
  They're doing that more here (putting neutral sections with reduced clearance under bridges) but it doesn't save everything. A major disadvantage of being early to the railway game is that we have amongst the most restrictive structure gauge in the world. It also turns out that we've repeatedly stopped and restarted our electrification campaign over the last hundred years, such that we have little persistent expertise and excessive costs per km. So it's not just tunnels and bridges.
pmyteh 4y ago
This. The capital costs are huge, such that it only makes marginal sense on a financial basis alone. You get further factoring in service improvements (lighter trains without diesel engines -> faster acceleration -> shorter journey tines), the societal benefits of decarbonisation, and electric trains breaking down less often, but that only moves the viable point so far. In the extreme case, a railway which is 200 miles long and takes 3 trains a day will never have a positive financial case for electrification. So once you've electrified all the stuff that should have been done decades ago (like main lines with 10 trains an hour) and then pushed on to the marginal stuff (hourly rural lines) there's still a small core of lines left. You could just bite the bullet and electrify them anyway, or you could go with things like battery electric trains (good for short distances off an electric mainline) or biodiesel/green hydrogen. The latter are likely to be cheaper.
- Arnt 4y ago
  Worth testing, anyway, and this looks like a good place to test them. Hydrogen trains might make sense even if hydrogen cars don't, since the trains run on their tracks, according to a fixed timetable, and need little new infrastructure.
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    The issue with Hydrogen is its storage technology. It requires a high pressure (300-bar minimum, 700-bar ideal) environment... or cryogenics to store compact liquid hydrogen. Building a small, personal, car-tank that withstands 700-bar of pressure and survives typical car accidents is... really difficult? However, building a large train-tank that withstands a typical derailment is far easier. ------ I don't think Hydrogen will ever be useful for personal cars. The pressure requirements / storage requirements look rather insane. I know there's groups working with carbon-fiber designs and other advanced materials, but those are really expensive. Larger trains / trucks can just use standard steel to contain the Hydrogen at 700-bar of pressure (because a bigger tank is easier to scale).
    - Arnt 4y ago
      Oh, I thought distribution was the main issue. Trains needing only one supply point, as opposed to masses of gas stations along the roads. TIL.
      - dragontamer 4y ago
        I mean, Toyota and Hyundai are making personal H2 vehicles. But they're expensive, very expensive, because those storage tanks are extremely sophisticated. Unless those storage tank costs come down by a LOT, I don't think H2 cars will compete reasonably against other technologies (Hybrid, PHEV, or EVs) ----- $50,000 for an H2 vehicle with only 180 horsepower engine is really meh.
thematrixturtle 4y ago
As a reference point for just how expensive, the Caltrain electrification project in SF is currently estimated at $2.44 billion dollars for 82 km of track, and still climbing. And this is for what's almost a best-case infrastructurally: flat land, few bridges or overpasses, etc. (But, admittedly, what just might the world's worst regulatory environment.)
- Symbiote 4y ago
  Midland Main Line in England "cost given as £1.3 billion pounds and also included three station modifications at Leicester, Derby and Sheffield. 422 single track miles of wiring was supposed to occur and a total of 120 bridges modified." So roughly 340km of double-track for $1.5bn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midland_Main_Line_railway_upgrade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midland_Main_Line_railway_upgr...
- izacus 4y ago
  American overinflated public infrastructure estimates aren't very useful for comparisons with Germany however. With the numbers US planners are spewing out, we'd never have fast train network in Switzerland or high-speed rail across Italy, France or Spain.
- MagnumOpus 4y ago
  $30 million per km (even if double-tracked) is exorbitant and can only be explained through entities who don't care spending Other People's Money. The UK government estimates £600k/track-km, so even in the US with high wages it should be doable at $2 million/km per track if budgeted carefully...
  - avn2109 4y ago
    Wait till you learn about the subways in NYC which they dig for comfortably over a billion dollars per mile...
- zbrozek 4y ago
  It would be interesting to know what drives cost gaps versus other jurisdictions.
jbu 4y ago
If the train had enough battery to get through the tunnel, but was charged on the main line, that would work wouldn't it?
- VaxWithSex 4y ago
  Yes and Deutsch Bahn is doing exactly this. Source: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/deutsche-bahn-siemens-wasserstoff-zug-brennstoffzelle-101.html https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/deutsche-bahn-siemens-w...
danw1979 4y ago
Anecdata: as a regular commuter on the east coast main line in the UK for several years, a very common source of service interruption was blamed on overhead cable problems. From an engineering perspective the complication of the track electrical infrastructure and pantograph seem inferior to a hydrogen tank and fuel cells. Far less actual stuff to build and maintain.
- Symbiote 4y ago
  That line was electrified as cheaply as possible. It's not a problem elsewhere. http://www.rail.co.uk/rail-news/ecml-suffers-another-failure/ http://www.rail.co.uk/rail-news/ecml-suffers-another-failure...
- VaxWithSex 4y ago
  Anecdata from Germany: that never happend to me. Mostly trees falling on the tracks.
- pmyteh 4y ago
  The East Coast Main Line is prone to dewirement (where the pantograph comes off the catenary and normally gets tangled and brings down the wire) at an unusually high rate. The folk wisdom is that the use of wired headspans instead of rigid portals, combined with a long distance between stanchions, makes it fragile. I don't know the extent to which that's true. Set against that, the miles per technical incident for electric trains are about twice that for diesel, and a train breaking down on the ECML is also disruptive, if not obviously infrastructural...
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Batteries can get you through the places where its hard/costly to directly electrify. The two techs are complementary. You see this on tram systems where bridges or junctions conplicate the overhead wires.

Kelteseth 4y ago

This is what we currently do in Germany [1], but it takes years to do that. Simply changing the locomotive is easier. [1] https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/friedrichshafen/suedbahn-faehrt-jetzt-mit-strom-100.html https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/friedrichsh...

VaxWithSex 4y ago
Also here: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/deutsche-bahn-siemens-wasserstoff-zug-brennstoffzelle-101.html https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/deutsche-bahn-siemens-w...

Barrin92 4y ago

cheaper maybe, easier definitely but diversifying into new tech is worth it in and of itself, this is more of an experiment if anything given that it's only about a dozen trains. If we're learning one lesson right now in Germany it's probably that having some things not running on the electricity grid is potentially a good idea. Hydrogen is energy dense, burns clean and doesn't depend on any system infrastructure, which is pretty neat. I think it's underused still, afaik Japan is the only other place betting some money on it.

sschueller 4y ago
It still doesn't solve the issue when you have trains coming from countries like Switzerland which is 100% electrified and you loose tons time switching locomotives.

cultofmetatron 4y ago

I agree, and for areas without active electric, we could probably use some combination of batteries and super capacitors to push the train along till it gets back into electrified rail.

dragontamer 4y ago

Hydrogen has the benefits of delayed time-of-use. For example, nuclear power continues to create energy at night, at 2am when there aren't many trains running. In contrast, when an electric train pulls from the grid, it needs electricity immediately, no matter how loaded the grid is. Electric Trains running at 7pm (during the "Duck curve") will inevitably be powered by natural-gas peaker plants. --------- In contrast, Hydrogen electrolysis could continue into the night and be powered by "otherwise unused" 2am or 3am electricity from nuclear power. Even if the train was running at 7pm, the electricity comes from the most advantageous time throughout the day. That is to say: Hydrogen is a fuel, AND a battery, AND is compatible with electrification technologies thanks to the fuel cell.

Kayou 4y ago
In that case what prevents us from building energy storage facilities that produce hydrogen at night and release the electricity back into the grid during the day? Wouldn't it be more efficient than transporting the hydrogen by truck and transporting the hydrogen battery on every train?
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Yes. That would be a better idea.
  - morphle 4y ago
    but it would still be very much more expensive than just solar
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      Solar isn't even competing against Hydrogen. Hydrogen is a storage technology, not really an energy source. Hydrogen competes with Li-ion batteries. How many Li-ion batteries do you need to equal one 200-ton liquid H2 storage tank? At 120MJ per kg, 200-tons == 200,000 kg == 6GW-hrs of electricity. There's no Li-ion battery in the world that's anywhere close to that kind of storage capacity... and various researchers are aiming at 3000ton H2 storage tanks. Erase 50% or even 80% of the energy due to inefficiency / costs of cryogenics, and you still have a bigger energy storage tank from H2 than anything possible with Li-ion. And the future of H2 is looking like 10x capacities are reasonable over the next 10 years. ------- Whatever solar solution you were thinking, just do the same except instead of using big, expensive, heavy Li-ion batteries, replace the storage mechanism with H2 fuel cells.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

edpichler 4y ago

There are many challenges in this solution. I don't understand about trains but I imagine that doing maintenance in one electrified line would shut down or overload other parts of the network. Also, energy transported this way could be easily stolen, they just need to pull some wires and hide underground. Also, to transport energy cheaply in long distances you need a very high voltage, that would electrify anything that gets closer to the track. That is why you see high voltage cables being only used in very high poles.

jonp888 4y ago
> I don't understand about trains but I imagine that doing maintenance in one electrified line would shut down or overload other parts of the network. The track is divided into section, so you can turn off parts of it. It isn't one continous wire, there are unelectrified dividers. > Also, energy transported this way could be easily stolen, they just need to pull some wires and hide underground. The standard voltage used is 25000 volts. You can't 'just' use it, you need an entire electricity substation. > Also, to transport energy cheaply in long distances you need a very high voltage, that would electrify anything that gets closer to the track. That is why you see high voltage cables being only used in very high poles. About 3 metres clearance is needed to avoid arcing. Anything higher is mainly to stop something hitting it.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I thought I'd read that was the long term plan for this specific railway? Or maybe that was an Italian plan I was thinking of.

VaxWithSex 4y ago

Yes and Deutsche Bahn is planning on doing it for all tracks where this is commercially and technologically feasible. The remaining tracks will mostly be battery electric trains and hydrogen. Source: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/deutsche-bahn-siemens-wasserstoff-zug-brennstoffzelle-101.html https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/deutsche-bahn-siemens-w...