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I even wonder about that, routes like Heart of Wales, Far North, Whitby, a few trains per day, any contribution from diesel exhaust will be minimal even at terminals.
My contribution to the UK Government tax revenue is minimal. Therefore I should not pay taxes
i.e. I agree with the practical point that rural railways will have a very high £/tCO2 abated, every application/industry will have some edge cases that are difficult/expensive, and we can't just look the other way for all of them. Especially when we have a massive carbon emitter in aviation. Rural electrification and premature replacement of 197s probably looks quite cheap compared to some aviation use cases.
Industry is already stretched as it is and struggles to find resources for existing projects, which is why there should have been a rolling electrification programme, moving the resources and assets from one location to the next.
This isn't just for railway infrastructure, the power firms can't get enough either, especially with huge changes to the grid with wind and other projects. It can take years to get a new major feed.
Absolutely. There's an enormous shopping list of electricity transmission investment that is either already authorised or in the process of being signed off for the 2026-2031 regulatory period. The next electricity distribution period from 2028 is expected to also see a massive ramp up in capital delivery, and the rail industry will have to compete for people competent to work on high voltage power systems.
Almost certainly they will have to use HVO (biofuel) in order to achieve their carbon targets. But I am sure there is somebody saying "Well, we tried bodging an EMU into a DMU and to be fair, that hasn't gone well. However, bodging a DMU into an EMU you say? How hard can that be?"
No new services, especially not heavy freight electric locomotives with their loads can use the electric.
All well and good wanting to electrify other parts of the network, but I don't think people realise how limited the existing electric infrastructure actually is.
Lineside batteries could/should have a role to play here in time as you can stick them in a field or redundant bit of land fenced off from the railway, which means fewer rail-certified people. Perhaps locate them at weak spots away from grid feeders to generate when the voltage dips, and recharge overnight or when a train is regenerating. However, it is very easy for me to jump onto an internet forum and give these kinds of theoretical solutions. Personal experience leads me to estimate that it would take ~3 years to actually do this as a first-of-a-kind system (including months of closely monitored operation to show the system is doing what it should).
Absolutely. There's an enormous shopping list of electricity transmission investment that is either already authorised or in the process of being signed off for the 2026-2031 regulatory period. The next electricity distribution period from 2028 is expected to also see a massive ramp up in capital delivery, and the rail industry will have to compete for people competent to work on high voltage power systems.
so train and build up a corps of NwR bods and keep redeploying them round the country. Make sure you treat them well so that they stay with you, the T&C from the start should be generous pay and allowances for working away from home as the norm, a decent pension and proper rail free travel.
Almost certainly they will have to use HVO (biofuel) in order to achieve their carbon targets. But I am sure there is somebody saying "Well, we tried bodging an EMU into a DMU and to be fair, that hasn't gone well. However, bodging a DMU into an EMU you say? How hard can that be?"
It's a real shame we can't get it to work, however there are diesel-under-the-wires services which could be replaced by surplus EMUs, maybe even re-jig some outer-suburban services to work like the Wrexham Central service at Bidston, with a good (easy and quick) cross-platform change to access the electric train into city centres. If we started by having a sustained bi- and tri-mode replacement of older stock we might get something that worked at a reasonable price.
Lineside batteries could/should have a role to play here in time as you can stick them in a field or redundant bit of land fenced off from the railway, which means fewer rail-certified people. Perhaps locate them at weak spots away from grid feeders to generate when the voltage dips, and recharge overnight or when a train is regenerating. However, it is very easy for me to jump onto an internet forum and give these kinds of theoretical solutions. Personal experience leads me to estimate that it would take ~3 years to actually do this as a first-of-a-kind system (including months of closely monitored operation to show the system is doing what it should).
3 years sound good enough to me, when can you start? (I'm sure none of it would be new technology, just needs someone to be given the project and told to get on with it!)
As a climate and energy system researcher, there are an awful lot of people who expect to be given priority for the comparatively tiny supply of biofuel.
I would not expect rail can rely on any significant tonnage of biofuel being provided - its all going to get swallowed by aviation and deep sea shipping, let alone chemicals.
The WCML is essentially not electrified north of Crewe as far as additional trains go, or converting from diesel hauled to electric. The presence of wires doesn't mean they're actually available.
As a climate and energy system researcher, there are an awful lot of people who expect to be given priority for the comparatively tiny supply of biofuel.
Agree with this; there has been a huge amount of wishful thinking in the transport sector about how much biofuel there is (and about how hydrogen can be a cheap and non-disruptive substitute).
What this means is that the quick and easy carbon reductions obtained simply by switching from diesel to HVO need to be seen as a transitional solution, not the end game. This has been more of a thing in the road freight sector, where it's been fun going to events where some logistics industry person has stood up and said "We can decarbonise by switching to HVO and then perhaps hydrogen", only for somebody like David Cebon (Cambridge professor) to then say, "Well... No" (and then evidence why).
Yes, but doing this costs money and requires strategic thinking/commitment, and frankly we've had years and perhaps decades of Treasury/DfT/NR showing that they are not up to the job of doing this.
Having worked in both the energy and transport sectors, I think the quality of strategic leadership in the transport industry is simply not as good as in the energy sector.
As a climate and energy system researcher, there are an awful lot of people who expect to be given priority for the comparatively tiny supply of biofuel.
I would not expect rail can rely on any significant tonnage of biofuel being provided - its all going to get swallowed by aviation and deep sea shipping, let alone chemicals.
The best thing that can be done to reduce shipping emissions is drastically reduce demand for oil and gas; as much as half of shipping traffic is just transporting those around the world. But yes I don't think rail should be relying on this and should focus on electric with battery support.
My main issue in the short term with running diesel under wires long distance isn't the fact electric isn't being used here, it's that DMUs are a premium at the moment, not helped by the target to abolish diesel off the network without any coherent delivery plan, so DMUs should be prioritised for routes where electric is not an option right now. In any case, a proper plan for electrification and battery deployment needs delivering too.
As a climate and energy system researcher, there are an awful lot of people who expect to be given priority for the comparatively tiny supply of biofuel.
I would not expect rail can rely on any significant tonnage of biofuel being provided - its all going to get swallowed by aviation and deep sea shipping, let alone chemicals.
The best thing that can be done to reduce shipping emissions is drastically reduce demand for oil and gas; as much as half of shipping traffic is just transporting those around the world
If only there was a centuries-old zero-carbon means of powering ships that could be used once again...
(I don't disagree with your point though - electrification in some form of the whole transport system should be a priority to reduce demand for oil generally!)
Who's going to put the wires up/replace them/maintain them as well as the local power supply feeders?
Industry is already stretched as it is and struggles to find resources for existing projects, which is why there should have been a rolling electrification programme, moving the resources and assets from one location to the next.
This isn't just for railway infrastructure, the power firms can't get enough either, especially with huge changes to the grid with wind and other projects. It can take years to get a new major feed.
Increasingly, the railway needs to make the decisions about power supply first, and then schedule the rest of the work to be done as the power supply becomes available, given the constraints on the electricity grid.
The other problem on the horizon is HS2 - at some point, and probably sooner than people realise, despite all the delays, there is going to be track being laid down, and wires strung up. Where are the skilled electrification staff going to come from to do that? It will be at the expense of other railway electrification work.
We need to start scaling up in advance of HS2 tbh, so that there is the staff both for maintenance and HS2 building and ideally some other expansion at the same time.
== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: ==
The carbon emissions for rail is low enough that an EV has to always have an average of 1.5 people using it per km to match the passenger emissions per km of rail (which is for the network as a while includes diesel and is 31g/km).
Yes there's some TOC's which need to do better, those who exceed the rate for one passenger in an EV (43g/km, 2025 data) are:
TfW rail 85g/km
ScotRail 60g/km
XC 59g/km
EMR 54g/km
Northern 54g/km
TPE 47g/km
Grand Central 43g/km
Chiltern and GWR (both 40g/km) as does Caledonian Sleeper (37g/km) need to improve a bit to stay ahead of EV's.
Otherwise the rest (all 33g/km or lower) do need to make some improvements to aid the reduction, but are less critical.
It is important to remember that both road EVs and electric railways will reduce in emissions every year from the electricity grid getting increasingly lower carbon.
TfW Rail is the biggest issue, mostly rural lines with limited scope for growth and a lot of fairly lightly used lines which makes more electrification less likely.
Retiring the HSTs, a relatively fuel-inefficient fleet, will reduce Scotrail emissions. Combined with (B)EMUs and further electrification, Scotrail is in a good place to reduce emissions.
XC we've covered, needs longer trains and a couple of bimodal trains as a start for the longer distance services, and something done with their non 22x fleet.
EMR is due to get bimodals, so that will help, but probably need something for their local fleet too.
Caledonian Sleeper is more tricky until there's bimodal locos for the Northern legs (or electrification allows a change to where the locos can swap over).
Almost certainly they will have to use HVO (biofuel) in order to achieve their carbon targets. But I am sure there is somebody saying "Well, we tried bodging an EMU into a DMU and to be fair, that hasn't gone well. However, bodging a DMU into an EMU you say? How hard can that be?"
There's a few problems with biofuel. One is that there simply isn't enough of it, as HSTed states, but another is that significant amounts of biofuel aren't actually sustainable, due to the land used in the production, which competes with food production and can drive conversion of natural ecosystems to agricultural land. This is especially problematic if the land being converted supports high levels of biodiversity, or stores larges amounts of carbon (which are typically released during conversion). Think rainforest conversion into sugarcane (for bioethanol) or palm oil (for biodiesel), for example. Or to go more into my field, the conversion of peatlands into any type of agricultural use!
Did they possibly already have electric paths in the limiting areas, and they've changed them?
Electric capacity may well only be available at certain times (as you can see with Avanti being able to start extra Liverpool services at some times but not others).
== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: ==
What this means is that the quick and easy carbon reductions obtained simply by switching from diesel to HVO need to be seen as a transitional solution, not the end game.
The problem is this believe that biodiesel/HVO is quick and easy, when it really isn't. To have carbon reductions you need safeguards in place to ensure you're not driving deforestation, conversion of peatlands, or driving hunger in the global south. None of that is easy (or quick!).
There have been cases of new palm oil being relabelled as waste frying oil from chippies/similar places, so it could be used for production of HVO.
The inherent problem is that the land use of biodiesel is simply way too large for it to ever be sustainable outside very small, specialised applications. The railway is not one of those, and frankly neither is road freight.
That's probably where the present CAF fleet will end up for the next 20-30 years or so. I seem to recall that was Northern's argument for ordering 2-car units despite the initial deployment plan not including very many 2-car workings. (Later they realised that the high acceleration of these units makes them very suitable for stuff like east Manchester locals, and 2-car has been quite useful for things like Rose Hill Marple).
Although presumably there are not enough inter-city EMUs to go around anyway, is there any scenario in which the trains could be hauled by diesel locomotives for the unelectrified portion of their journey? Would the couplers match?
Although presumably there are not enough inter-city EMUs to go around anyway, is there any scenario in which the trains could be hauled by diesel locomotives for the unelectrified portion of their journey? Would the couplers match?
Although presumably there are not enough inter-city EMUs to go around anyway, is there any scenario in which the trains could be hauled by diesel locomotives for the unelectrified portion of their journey? Would the couplers match?
Sticking with Mike's point (alot of weight and mass to be moved) for now though, alot of the newer DMUs are a fair bit heavier than Sprinters, and features such as air conditioning are now provided as-standard on new trains. Top speeds have also increased to 100mph instead of 90mph or 75mph. As a result, the newer units DMUs have more-powerful engines to cope with the extra load and so it's not meerly a case of newer engines are more-efficient and reduce fuel consuption. The best solution I can see in the medium-long term is to reduce the weight of trains by having the power supplied from a external feed (OHLE or live rail) so reducing the need to carry heavy batteries / diesel fuel around on the train. That's something road vehicles can't easily match.
The other part of the issue is the whole-life cost (in environmental terms). You only have to look at the controversy over making 'virgin' steel in the UK (eg. proposed electric arc furance to produce recycled steel) to see that production of the metal required to build a train (or a road vehicle for that matter) has a significant cost in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. However, most trains for the UK seem to be built with a 35-40 year service life in mind, which is the key reason why ...
22x are so heavy, inefficient and polluting that this is not necessarily true, particularly not compared to a fully occupied modern petrol car or worse an EV. These filthy fume belchers basically ruin Lumo's environmental credentials entirely. They should be scrapped ASAP.
... I don't entirely agree with that last sentence. Yes, the 22x series is rather hard to justify on tailpipe emissions versus road vehicles, but because of the 'embedded carbon' from their construction I cannot argee with scrapping the entire 22x fleet (this is also part of my argument that the CAF Civity class 195, 196 and 197 fleets should be returned to CAF and converted into new subclasses of the class 331 EMUs (with or without batteries for off-wire extensions)).
At least while we still have unelectrified routes to deploy them on, we should keep what we have until it is life-expired to avoid building yet more inefficient (because they would have to be weighed down with independent power sources for off-wire operation) new trains. However, we should have stopped building new trains that were unable to draw power from live rail and/or OHLE as soon as bi-mode/IPEMU technology was proven. Otherwise, the business case for any extension of electrification would be impossible to make until the DMUs were due for replacement.
In the case of the 22x however, since the design has been shown to support reforming of units into different set lengths, I do think scrapping a small number of driving cars (partly because they provide less passenger accomodation) and reforming the remaining units into longer trains, would be a good idea. I'd also do something similar with some of the 5-car Hitachi bi-modes (eg. 800s and 802s) although since these do have pantographs I wouldn't scrap the driving cars but instead build new intermediate cars to make EMUs. (eg. start out with 16x 5-car bi-modes and end up with 8x 8-car bi-modes and 8x 9-car EMUs - no change to the total number of driving cars, diesel gensets or units but all 16 units lengthened significantly by buiding only new EMU intermediate cars).
I would argue that it's not that simple; not by a long shot. See:
... and that's just part of the issue.
Sticking with Mike's point (alot of weight and mass to be moved) for now though, alot of the newer DMUs are a fair bit heavier than Sprinters, and features such as air conditioning are now provided as-standard on new trains. Top speeds have also increased to 100mph instead of 90mph or 75mph. As a result, the newer units DMUs have more-powerful engines to cope with the extra load and so it's not meerly a case of newer engines are more-efficient and reduce fuel consuption. The best solution I can see in the medium-long term is to reduce the weight of trains by having the power supplied from a external feed (OHLE or live rail) so reducing the need to carry heavy batteries / diesel fuel around on the train. That's something road vehicles can't easily match.
The other part of the issue is the whole-life cost (in environmental terms). You only have to look at the controversy over making 'virgin' steel in the UK (eg. proposed electric arc furance to produce recycled steel) to see that production of the metal required to build a train (or a road vehicle for that matter) has a significant cost in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. However, most trains for the UK seem to be built with a 35-40 year service life in mind, which is the key reason why ...
... I don't entirely agree with that last sentence. Yes, the 22x series is rather hard to justify on tailpipe emissions versus road vehicles, but because of the 'embedded carbon' from their construction I cannot argee with scrapping the entire 22x fleet (this is also part of my argument that the CAF Civity class 195, 196 and 197 fleets should be returned to CAF and converted into new subclasses of the class 331 EMUs (with or without batteries for off-wire extensions)).
At least while we still have unelectrified routes to deploy them on, we should keep what we have until it is life-expired to avoid building yet more inefficient (because they would have to be weighed down with independent power sources for off-wire operation) new trains. However, we should have stopped building new trains that were unable to draw power from live rail and/or OHLE as soon as bi-mode/IPEMU technology was proven. Otherwise, the business case for any extension of electrification would be impossible to make until the DMUs were due for replacement.
In the case of the 22x however, since the design has been shown to support reforming of units into different set lengths, I do think scrapping a small number of driving cars (partly because they provide less passenger accomodation) and reforming the remaining units into longer trains, would be a good idea. I'd also do something similar with some of the 5-car Hitachi bi-modes (eg. 800s and 802s) although since these do have pantographs I wouldn't scrap the driving cars but instead build new intermediate cars to make EMUs. (eg. start out with 16x 5-car bi-modes and end up with 8x 8-car bi-modes and 8x 9-car EMUs - no change to the total number of driving cars, diesel gensets or units but all 16 units lengthened significantly by buiding only new EMU intermediate cars).
The embedded carbon from 22x production is pretty small, they've been in service for 20+ years, and it's likely their diesel engines emit multiples of the carbon that was caused by their production every year. There is no environmental argument for retaining the 22x.
Battery trains are the future, infrastructure needs to be built to accommodate that fact.
Running them under the wires for 95% of the journey is not something they should be deployed on. If they're not ready for scrap then derate them to improve fuel economy and cascade them to Regional Express type services.
The options:
A)
- 222s operate and they start to build a passenger base
- 222s are replaced by 80x in a few years time
B)
- Freight companies who don't use their electric paths have the power access taken away
- Lumo start with refurbished EMUs (e.g. 350/2s)
C)
No trains.
A has clearly been chosen, and while I would be a fan of a use it or lose it for freight train's electric rights, I don't see B happening and I think C is just the worst option becuase less trains (although EMR would probably be happy if they got to keep their 222s for a bit longer)
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