Have Trains had their day?

[AdamWW]

Why are such motorised vehicles allowed on public pedestrian pavements when electric scooters and boards with a sentient being aboard (well a teenager anyway) are not?

Because they go a lot more slowly?

 

[Magdalia]

They clearly have a (early) dalek-like inability to climb stairs

Recently the Fire and Rescue Service were called out to an incident in a part of Cambridge where the delivery daleks operate. The Fire and Rescue Service put out a hosepipe across the pavement which the delivery daleks were unable to negotiate.

 

[Trainguy34]

Maybe at traffic lights in the zone they operate in they should have sensors so they just activate it as if a pedestrian is pressing the button. Or in areas where there is an unplanned obstruction there should be a siren-esque warning to alert others.

 

[Sorcerer]

I think in relation to the original subject, that being whether trains have had their day, I think that despite poor management and a borderline anti-rail government (slightly hyperbole I admit) that the train not only hasn't had it's day, but I think that it could just as well be a vital part of the future with proper management and long-term infrastructure planning. In the age of a climate emergency, trains are crucial for moving around large numbers of people over a wide variety of distances. On a local level good investment in local transport including light rail or heavy metro networks can get more cars off the road, and on a long-distance basis Italy has shown us that a well integrated network of high speed trains can outcompete the domestic air market. Given the population distribution in the UK combined with it's size, the vast majority of towns and cities are within or well below the 800-1000km distance that railways can safely compete with road and air travel.

 

[Thirteen]

The Elizabeth Line being a huge success and the fact new railway stations are being built every year is proof that rail has not had its day.

It's hyperbole to suggest the Government will close the railway, they wouldn't without backlash or a suitable replacement.

 

[Irascible]

Why are such motorised vehicles allowed on public pedestrian pavements when electric scooters and boards with a sentient being aboard (well a teenager anyway) are not? Would these things be allowed to roll onto public transport where there's level boarding? Could they purchase travel authority via a wireless link, beep in with a built in oyster card chip or something. They clearly have a (early) dalek-like inability to climb stairs as well so no good for delivering to high-rise blocks when there's a lift failure, assuming they're allowed in the lift. Perhaps later models will be able to levitate - the cargo 'pod' could be detachable from the rolling chassis and an emergency UAV could come and lift it up to floor 9 in that event... then release the package for it to fall back to ground level and shatter into a million pieces then leave a sorry note at the target address. I still think there will be a growing army of anonymous vans going round lifting these things off the street to retrieve their contents, never to be seen again.

People will inveitably make a sport out of turning the things on their heads or otherwise confusing them. Flying drones for food delivery would seem the obvious place to start, other than there being liability issues... The field of autonomous vehicles in general is definitely a minefield.

 

[HSTEd]

I don't think that trains necessarily have had their day.

They remain a highly useful method of public transportation of people and some materiel.

However, the railway network as it is exists today has become woefully inadequate to serve this purpose. The coronavirus pandemic and such have accelerated trends that were already occuring and have also caused us new problems.

As an example, it might be that everyone is getting fatter (or just generally bigger due to improved nutrition), it might be that people don't like to crush into each other the way they did before coronavirus, but the inside of trains seem a hell of a lot more cramped than they used to be. Everyone is half in the aisle, which isn't helped by our tiny loading gauge.
If that continues we are going to have serious capacity issues.

Our rail system has an overhang of infrastructure from the Victorian era that has been bodged repeatedly, and the low performance of many trains on many lines forces us into suboptimal timetabling and operational choices.

Meanwhile the industry itself is moribund in many ways, it seems to struggle with any modernisation at all and ends up in huge fights. All the while its financial position deteriorates.
We have a schizophrenic attitude to upgrades or new infrastructure, and the black hole is not going to improve any time soon. All our upgrade and newbuild plans seem to fail miserably.

Meanwhile, if, as it appears, electric cars become a big thing over the next decade and a half, the environmental credentials the railway has hid behind for a generation are going to disintegrate. Who will want to spend this much on a poorly functioning railway then?

I must admit I am not optimistic. HS2 has turned into a mess and in any case I don't think it is really suitable to the task of staunching the bleeding of our modern railway system. I have to feel we would have been far better off with a Shinkansen that would have made the bulk of the WCML infrastructure surplus to requirements. But there we are, in any case there will be no more new rail infrastructure built from scratch for a generation or more.

 

[Gholm]

I doubt any Tory government is going to be that invested in a decent railway service. They fly everywhere, assume we drive everywhere and shape policies to match. The cost per kilometre to do any upgrade to existing track, let alone lay anything new, is staggering. I think long term government indifference is partly to blame as well as a general attitude of kicking the proverbial can down the road. Decades of underinvestment or 'biting the bullet' when it comes to major investment results in an ugly patchwork quilt of a network with spotty electrification and obvious bottlenecks.

I sometimes wonder if we are cursed by being the first? Our wimpy loading gauge was dictated two centuries ago by men with top hats. We can't use European stock 'off the peg' like other countries, so we still prod 37s into service where you might see Eurodual or Vectron locos on the continent. Plans to run high speed intercity services are hampered by infrastructure built by the same fellas with top hats, who probably considered 25 mph to be 'a fair clip'.

At the moment the UK government are poised to drop the chunk of HS2 that will somehow solve complex multi-generational socioeconomic issues in the north of England. We are looking at a government that is more interested in asset stripping or selling off public services to their mates, installing a tollbooth or turnstile on anything left and shuttering the rest. Entirely the wrong political landscape for new railway projects to thrive.

The current UK government absolutely won't do anything major to fix anything. Labour would hopefully do something, though properly not enough, it has just gotten so expensive because the problems are so big.

I don't think it's really a problem that the UK got there first. The issue with lacking access to "off the peg" rolling stock isn't that big, if anything it means that the railways are forced to buy rolling stock fit for purpose rather than an unsuitable standard product that they were forced to buy because it was the cheapest. The UK has its own standard stock, like Electrostars, Aventras and the IETs (quality varies of course, as it does on the continent as well). The issue is mainly the lack of any true UK based manufacturers. Ancient locomotives are still commonlplace on the continent, especially in the freight sector. In fact, the UK is blessed with the rather young EMD and Stadler locos. Here in Denmark, MY, MX and MZ classes, the built between 1954 and 1978, still form the main bulk of freight work, with almost all newer locomotives still being second hand stock that's been withdrawn from passenger services because of old age. And reagarding infrastructure, very little of the older infrastructure on the continent is suited for high speed running. Almost all the high speed lines in europe are newbuilds are so drastically changed that it is basically a new line.

The UK is and has for many years been, as you rightly say, hampered by politics. And you are not alone in that, sadly.

 

[AdamWW]

Meanwhile, if, as it appears, electric cars become a big thing over the next decade and a half, the environmental credentials the railway has hid behind for a generation are going to disintegrate. Who will want to spend this much on a poorly functioning railway then?

Sure - if we have enough capacity for renewable energy generation (and the ability to get it to everyone to charge their cars) that energy efficiency is no longer an issue, then the environmental advantage of trains becomes much less.

But if we don't have unlimited energy to throw around then trains are still more efficient, particularly ones that don't have to lug heavy batteries around with them (and suffer the losses inherent in storing electricity in batteries).

 

[HSTEd]

But if we don't have unlimited energy to throw around then trains are still more efficient, particularly ones that don't have to lug heavy batteries around with them (and suffer the losses inherent in storing electricity in batteries).

They might be marginally more efficient, but electrification costs continue to climb into the stratosphere.

The reality is it will be battery cars versus battery trains or diesel trains. Given how moribund the railway is, primarily the latter.

 

[AdamWW]

They might be marginally more efficient,

I'd be interested to see the figures because for long distance travel I would have thought it would be more than marginal. Though of course it depends on how many people you get into each car, and trains can't be made as light as cars because of the crashworthiness requirements they have to meet.

The reality is it will be battery cars versus battery trains or diesel trains.

Not where we already have electrification - or are you assuming that the railway will abandon existing schemes as a cost-cutting measure?

They might be marginally more efficient, but electrification costs continue to climb into the stratosphere.

I suspect that building all the new roads we'll need in cities to accomodate all the electric cars replacing trains won't come cheap, even if people accept the destruction that would involve.

 

[HSTEd]

I'd be interested to see the figures because for long distance travel I would have thought it would be more than marginal. Though of course it depends on how many people you get into each car, and trains can't be made as light as cars because of the crashworthiness requirements they have to meet.

I was referring to electric trains vs battery ones.

The batteries aren't really a major weight component on the train.
The same efficiency in carrying heavy loads that you cite as the primary advantage of the train compared to the car also makes carrying the batteries relatively easy!

Not where we already have electrification - or are you assuming that the railway will abandon existing schemes as a cost-cutting measure?

The electrified railway represents only a portion of the system (less than half of route mileage).
If the non electrified sections wither and die once the environmentalist credentials disintegrate, the industry will be far diminished compared to today.

The remaining network effects and economies of scale will vanish and you can very easily end up in a death spiral.

I suspect that building all the new roads we'll need in cities to accomodate all the electric cars replacing trains won't come cheap, even if people accept the destruction that would involve.

It is important to note that the urban railway is also a small portion of the rail system, at least in personnel terms.
If the primary remaining rail systems in England are Crossrail, London Underground and the other light rail/metro systems, would that be a bright future?

 

[Sorcerer]

I suspect that building all the new roads we'll need in cities to accomodate all the electric cars replacing trains won't come cheap, even if people accept the destruction that would involve.

This is another good reason to argue why trains aren't and won't be growing obsolete. Even though electric cars have their place, they still take up as much room as petrol and diesel-powered cars and thus will not actually fix issues relating to car-based infrastructure other than less pollution. Transporting goods by electric trucks will also still be less efficient than electric trains just based on how much can be moved with each mode of transport individually. Electric road vehicles still have their place of course, but in some areas they can never truly match the efficiency of a train.

 

[HSTEd]

Transporting goods by electric trucks will also still be less efficient than electric trains just based on how much can be moved with each mode of transport individually.

This is only true if you assume that either distances are very long (which they aren't in the UK), or the cost of transloading material from lorries onto trainsa nd then back again is cheap (it emphatically is not).

You need so many personnel and so much equipment to operate two rail loading/unloading points and then running a train between them that it can never be competitive with a much quicker, straight through run on a lorry (especially as lorry load volumes keep increasing).

Which is why rail freight only survives because the government does not require it to pay any real contribution to the cost of the infrastructure it uses.

 

[Sorcerer]

This is only true if you assume that either distances are very long (which they aren't in the UK), or the cost of transloading material from lorries onto trainsa nd then back again is cheap (it emphatically is not).

You need so many personnel and so much equipment to operate two rail loading/unloading points and then running a train between them that it can never be competitive with a much quicker, straight through run.

Which is why rail freight only survives because the government does not require it to pay any real contribution to the cost of the infrastructure it uses.

Which is why I said electric vehicles still have their place. Over short distances it obviously won't make as much practical sense to transport goods by a long freight train compared to a lorry for example, even for transporting goods to a rail freight terminal, but over long distances train will win out for time and efficiency. I don't quite know the optimal distance in which trains are the best choices compared to the 800-1000km for high speed passenger trains to compete with short haul airlines, but there is definitely a point where even an electric lorry or truck won't beat the train.

 

[AdamWW]

I was referring to electric trains vs battery ones.

The batteries aren't really a major weight component on the train.
The same efficiency in carrying heavy loads that you cite as the primary advantage of the train compared to the car also makes carrying the batteries relatively easy!

Again I don't have figures (maybe you do) but I would have thought that the mass penalty of a pure battery train would be significant. Battery energy density is considerably less than diesel, and of course batteries don't get lighter when you use them up. If you're talking about a train that can recharge every hour so then maybe.

There must be a reason that we aren't even considering replacing, say, class 66's with battery engines that can haul freight all day.

The electrified railway represents only a portion of the system (less than half of route mileage).
If the non electrified sections wither and die once the environmentalist credentials disintegrate, the industry will be far diminished compared to today.

The remaining network effects and economies of scale will vanish and you can very easily end up in a death spiral.

Maybe but I think the idea that even with a drastic pruning of the railway system we'd see, say, the ECML and WCML shut down is overly pessimistic.

And is the primary reason that we still run trains in the UK really the enviromental aspect? It certainly didn't used to be even if it's now used as a justification. I'm not sure that electric cars are a killer opposition, though I suspect that autonomous cars, particularly if they can be platooned to improve capacity on motoways, could be a serious threat.

It is important to note that the urban railway is also a small portion of the rail system, at least in personnel terms.
If the primary remaining rail systems in England are Crossrail, London Underground and the other light rail/metro systems, would that be a bright future?

No but I don't think those are the only rail lines transporting significant numbers of people into cities. Maybe I'm wrong but if you shut down all the National Rail lines into London apart from Crossrail I think we'd struggle to get everyone in and out in the rush hour (unless cars were severly limited and we ran lots of coaches, maybe). Likewise for some other cities.

 

[Irascible]

You need so many personnel and so much equipment to operate two rail loading/unloading points and then running a train between them that it can never be competitive with a much quicker, straight through run on a lorry (especially as lorry load volumes keep increasing).

Which is yet another arrea the railway should really be looking at. That'd be a long term project with gains outside the railway, so of course nobody is going to do it, because we don't do that sort of thinking anymore.

 

[HSTEd]

Again I don't have figures (maybe you do) but I would have thought that the mass penalty of a pure battery train would be significant. Battery energy density is considerably less than diesel, and of course batteries don't get lighter when you use them up. If you're talking about a train that can recharge every hour so then maybe.

The load of diesel aboard the train is not really a significant fraction of the mass of the train though.
A CLass 158 only embarks 1750 litres of diesel per carriage, which sounds like a lot by car standards but still only weighs around 1400kg. You could double or triple the "fuel" weight in the form of batteries and it wouldn't really change much about the weight of the train. Modern carriage are 40t+ these days after all.

Also an electrical control pack and motors is way lighter than a diesel engine these days.

There must be a reason that we aren't even considering replacing, say, class 66's with battery engines that can haul freight all day.

The primary reason is the same reason for anything on the modern railway, there is no driver for change.

Rail freight operators pay no petroleum fuel duty and essentially no VAT (taxed at 5%) on their diesel.
Indeed for a significant portion of the last couple of years its been cheaper to run a Class 66 than an electric locomotive.
They also have no prospect of being forced to cease operations by emissions standards, which will never apply retrospectively.

(Hence the large amounts of effort spent obtaining more old design diesel engines that werent exempt from emissions standards).

And is the primary reason that we still run trains in the UK really the enviromental aspect? It certainly didn't used to be even if it's now used as a justification. I'm not sure that electric cars are a killer opposition, though I suspect that autonomous cars, particularly if they can be platooned to improve capacity on motoways, could be a serious threat.

It is one of the primary reasons behind the unprecedented money that has poured into the industry for the last two decades, yes.
The times have been good for a long time, but the political consensus about pumping so much money into the railways has been cracking since before coronavirus and is now apparently disintegrating.

Hard times are ahead.

 

[AdamWW]

The load of diesel aboard the train is not really a significant fraction of the mass of the train though.
A CLass 158 only embarks 1750 litres of diesel per carriage, which sounds like a lot by car standards but still only weighs around 1400kg. You could double or triple the "fuel" weight in the form of batteries and it wouldn't really change much about the weight of the train. Modern carriage are 40t+ these days after all.

A quick Google (dangerous...possibly I'm missing something) suggests something more like a factor of 25 difference in energy density between batteries and diesel.

I take your point about lack of pressure to replace existing freight locomotives but - for example - Transport for Wales is buying new diesel trains (which will have to be compliant with the latest emission regulations) and partially electrifying lines. There must be a reason they aren't just buying trains with battery packs that can power them all day.

It is one of the primary reasons behind the unprecedented money that has poured into the industry for the last two decades, yes.
The times have been good for a long time, but the political consensus about pumping so much money into the railways has been cracking since before coronavirus and is now apparently disintegrating.#

Interesting. I'm not privy to information on government decision making but as an outsider it hasn't come across to me that the view over the last 20 years was that previous reasons to fund railways no longer apply and that it was only environmental considerations keeping them going.

You need so many personnel and so much equipment to operate two rail loading/unloading points and then running a train between

Only one additional unloading point if you run container trains straight from docks, though.

 

[HSTEd]

Transport for Wales is buying new diesel trains (which will have to be compliant with the latest emission regulations) and partially electrifying lines. There must be a reason they aren't just buying trains with battery packs that can power them all day.

Well if diesel remains as cheap as it has been compared to electricity, again negligble driver to actually do anything at the moment.
And when those trains were ordered, several years ago, the outlook for batteries was much less rosy than it is now.

Which is why more and more battery solutions are appearing in the mainstream.

But the reality is that the diesel trains are going to be competing with electric cars by midlife.

Interesting. I'm not privy to information on government decision making but as an outsider it hasn't come across to me that the view over the last 20 years was that previous reasons to fund railways no longer apply and that it was only environmental considerations keeping them going.

The previous reasons to fund the railway won't generate the shear quantity of moeny that has flowed in for the last twenty years though.
State funding of the railways exploded compared to previous levels in the late 90s and early 2000s, about the same time the environmentalist factors became a serious concern.

Correlation, not strictly causation but I think it is naive to assume the two things were not linked.

A quick Google (dangerous...possibly I'm missing something) suggests something more like a factor of 25 difference in energy density between batteries and diesel.

Once you account for efficiency its probably something like 15-20 on a mass density, yes.

But even if you tried to pack as much energy in battery form into the train, it will still only increase its mass from something around 40 to 60 tonnes.
I've turned the Sprinter into a Class 185!

And electric charging will be significantly simpler logistically than handling petroleum oils, and you get about 20% back with regenerative braking. So we aren't that far from being operationally capable of supporting pure battery trains, if the industry wishes it.

 

[AdamWW]

And electric charging will be significantly simpler logistically than handling petroleum oils, and you get about 20% back with regenerative braking. So we aren't that far from being operationally capable of supporting pure battery trains, if the industry wishes it.

I would have thought that it's somewhat easier to bring in road tankers to fill up a tank than provide a high enough current eletricity supply to charge a fleet of trains overnight.

 

[notadriver]

Wg

I have sometimes thought about the practicality of converting railways to busways and concluded it would just not be as good as railways at transporting large number of people. Theoretically, a single carriageway busway could accommodate 900 buses an hour, however stations and junctions would reduce that considerably, perhaps to something like 200 buses an hour. 200 buses carrying 50 passengers equates to 10,000 passengers an hour. A railway with 18 trains per hour each carrying 1,000 passengers, can carry 18,000 passengers, almost double that of the busway.

Buses also will never be as fast as trains. A non stop bus with an average speed of 60 mph would take approx 7 hours to travel to London to Edinburgh, whereas a train today can do it in four and half hours.

Longer term, driverless cars I think will pose somewhat of a threat to trains, particularly for shorter journeys, however realistically I can’t see them becoming common until the 2040’s as there are a number of issues with them to iron out. Even when they do start becoming common, the issue of congestion will still there and they will still take a lot longer than trains.

I wonder what the actual average speed is for the fastest coach service to Edinburgh from London ? And how much faster is that car - obeying the actual 70 mph motorway/ dual carriageway speed limit?

 

[Mcr Warrior]

I wonder what the actual average speed is for the fastest coach service to Edinburgh from London ? And how much faster is that car - obeying the actual 70 mph motorway/ dual carriageway speed limit?

Sounds like a variation on the premise of an episode of "Top Gear" during the years when Messrs Clarkson et al were still presenters.

 

[HSTEd]

I would have thought that it's somewhat easier to bring in road tankers to fill up a tank than provide a high enough current eletricity supply to charge a fleet of trains overnight.

Once you provide the supply you are set for a very long time and charging takes minimal labour.

The risk assesments for bulk petroleum handling from a road tanker will require a lot of expensive and tedious mitigations against spills and fires.

 

[Inthislife]

There are certainly lines where this could work. However, not most of them. A line at full capacity can take a 12 coach train more or less every 3 minutes per track. A 12 coach train can take well over a thousand people. Let’s call it a thousand to be conservative. That’s 333 people per minute, 100 every 20 seconds, 5 every second. There are very few other way to transport that number. Now, obviously no line is quite at that capacity because of bottlenecks, junctions etc. But somewhere like East Croydon to London, the lines into Waterloo, through Stratford, etc aren’t that far off during peak times.

For busy lines, the disadvantage of buses are they are smaller, so need more drivers, slower (sometimes, a lot, lot slower), and less efficient (steel on steel is very efficient for moving large masses). For most lines, the train is best.

However, for smaller branch lines, like the Looe line, I have a (personally sinking) feeling that your idea would make a lot of sense. Compared to a usually mostly empty, 2 coach diesel sprinter, a bus would be better environmentally (cheaper to build than an electric train too), more flexiable (better serving places in the way), probably just as quick, and cheaper to operate overall (although mostly because rail staff insist on having guards and paying train drivers a lot more than bus drivers).

So I think many of these other people are being too quick to criticise.

Yes but I don’t see 12 coach trains very often and a double decker bus takes 75 seated passengers, run as many buses as you like? Train breaks down it is a nightmare to replace, bus breaks down roll another one out?

Totally agree European rail is decent, I don’t include the UK in that.

No, I guess some longer rail journeys would be a better idea if they are maintained properly.

Could be back in the car and flying to Glasgow I think?!! Bit sad!

 

[Bletchleyite]

Yes but I don’t see 12 coach trains very often

Guess you don't go to the South East very often? (By the way a 9 car 80x, which you should see fairly often down that way, is 234m long, which is only just short of the 240m of a 12-car South East EMU).

and a double decker bus takes 75 seated passengers, run as many buses as you like? Train breaks down it is a nightmare to replace, bus breaks down roll another one out?

If you want to see your proposal in action, take a trip to Cambridgeshire and ride the St Ives busway. It's a lovely quirk, feeling a bit like a double decker Pacer on a branch line, and it has allowed a substantial increase in services fairly quickly which a heavy rail solution wouldn't. It is however slower than rail and starting to get quite tatty (no need for instance to put fake cobwebs up for Halloween, the shelters are covered in real ones).

 

[AdamWW]

If you want to see your proposal in action, take a trip to Cambridgeshire and ride the St Ives busway. It's a lovely quirk, feeling a bit like a double decker Pacer on a branch line, and it has allowed a substantial increase in services fairly quickly which a heavy rail solution wouldn't. It is however slower than rail and starting to get quite tatty (no need for instance to put fake cobwebs up for Halloween, the shelters are covered in real ones).

And if a bus breaks down it blocks it as effectively as a train blocking the line.

 

[BrianW]

And if a bus breaks down it blocks it as effectively as a train blocking the line.

How much is resilience/ contingency 'worth'? Everything costs, and is at the expense of something else, which may be more desirable?

 

[Bletchleyite]

And if a bus breaks down it blocks it as effectively as a train blocking the line.

The difference being, though, that you can route buses around such a blockage on regular roads. Try running a Class 150 down the A-whatever-it-is.

 

[MarkyT]

How much is resilience/ contingency 'worth'? Everything costs, and is at the expense of something else, which may be more desirable?

That the particular mechanical kerb guidance system used doesn't allow vehicles to reverse out of trouble makes the system less resilient in that respect to rail based modes. On the other hand every 'level crossing' with an ordinary road is a place a bus can use as a junction to leave the guideway in an emergency. Swings and roundabouts.