Rail decarbonisation: What are the solutions?

[Purple Orange]

This all reads to me like people want to close the railways down. I’m sure the enthusiasts on the forum would prefer to run the whole thing as a heritage railway anyhow.

 

[HSTEd]

This all reads to me like people want to close the railways down. I’m sure the enthusiasts on the forum would prefer to run the whole thing as a heritage railway anyhow.

I would love to see dramatic rail system expansion and revitalisation - but the amount of money this would cost would be enormous.
There would also be a great many sacred cows to slaughter.

Hell I'm the person constantly proposing Shinkansen all over the place!


But we have to face the reality, given the mess the HS2 project has caused, and the desire of accountants to try and save pennies on design by provoking political arguments, no meaningful expansion will be possible - at least in the next few years.

 

[Bletchleyite]

This all reads to me like people want to close the railways down. I’m sure the enthusiasts on the forum would prefer to run the whole thing as a heritage railway anyhow.

Quite the opposite. I think electric cars and electric buses are a huge threat to the non-electrified railway, and the railway will have to solve that before it does get closed down.

 

[Bald Rick]

The government have been calling their 'Road Investment Strategy' 'the biggest road building programme since the Romans' and boasting of the £27bn 'investment' for the current 5 year period. If that's not 'a general push to expand road capacity' then it is at least an attempt to appear to be one.

That £27bn covers all costs for the Strategic Highway Network - operations, maintenance, safety schemes, renewals, future studies

The ‘enhancements’ element is £14bn. That’s compared to £9.4bn for enhancements for NR in a similar timeframe, which excludes spend on HS2, Crossrail, and some of EWR.

And even then, talking about electric cars as if they're already somehow in mass adoption isn't the best framing. There's actually a tiny market penetration as of yet.

21% of March registrations were fully or hybrid electric (ie with an electric only mode) 8% full, 6% plug in hybrid, 7.5% hybrid. Market share has nearly doubled in a year. Hardly ‘tiny’ market penetration.

Quite the opposite. I think electric cars and electric buses are a huge threat to the non-electrified railway, and the railway will have to solve that before it does get closed down.

A threat yes, (buses in particular), but not a huge threat.

 

[Bletchleyite]

A threat yes, (buses in particular), but not a huge threat.

Certainly a threat to branch lines. Not just a certain one in North Wales only navigable by boat at certain times of year, but also stuff like Ormskirk-Preston, Kirkby-Wigan and the likes, where a bus could easily accommodate the demand and a 1980s DMU is many orders of magnitude more polluting than even a modern diesel bus, let alone an electric one.

I very much fear another Beeching style pruning if the railway doesn't find a good way to decarbonise branch lines pretty sharpish.

 

[doorhanger93]

What's less efficient?

One man, his dog and his bicycle in a two-tonne electric car, or one man, his dog and his bicycle in a 70-tonne DMU?

Be careful what you wish for.

The DMU could carry maybe 100 people, though. And really you want electrification to replace DMUs with EMUs. Plus, most people don't have electric cars - for that to happen we need, as I've explained, a grid expansion dwarfing any rolling electrification plan, which would solve the whole DMU issue.

Why are you adding in commercial vehicles?
That's an entirely different category of vehicle?

Do we really want diesel trucks, buses, and such on the roads in this EV future? It's something that has to be accounted for in a comparison with rail electrification, which works just as well for commercial operations as passenger ones.

200TWh for cars is a rather silly assumption, given that would mean grid-to-battery efficiency of only about 45%!

That was actually an upper bound based on using only about 30% of the energy equivalent of current transportation oil demand, allowing for slight expansion of vehicles, so perhaps my figures were off.

People restricted to travel at the convenience of operators who don't really care because they have no meaningful competition in your glorious post car world?

That's like apples trying to compete with oranges. The bulk of people who use transit use transit because they don't own a car or can't practically drive to where they need to go. Sure, there is a level of competition for some people who use both, and certainly competition for the necessary modal shift from cars to transit, but rail is absolutely not "regulated" in any way by competition from cars, that's a fantasy. And, I don't see why these public structures have to be so distant and bureaucratic - people tend to assume that democracy must stop at which colour you put in the ballot box, but there's no reason why people considered responsible enough to choose their leaders couldn't have more accountability in the transit they use.
Also, who said anything about post-car? I'm just saying we need a modal shift, nothing about abolishing the road vehicle.

And there is tiny penetration of public transport and any expansion will be colossally expensive?

A much greater penetration than that of electric cars. If you want to see actually existing mass electric transport, looking at Tesla is missing the forest for the one tree with fancy marketing.
Any expansion will be colossally expensive, yes, (although it's not like the current costs in the UK aren't partially byzantine corruption and subsidies to business partners, and that in other countries the prices aren't generally lower). But will it be that much more expensive that expanding the gird by a third and dramatically increasing transmission capacity to cope with mass adoption of electric vehicles? Will it be more expensive than when Britain went from having basically no highway roads to a country covered in motorways and highway a-roads in a few decades? Will it be more expensive than having to pay in lives when half this country is below sea level?

This all reads to me like people want to close the railways down. I’m sure the enthusiasts on the forum would prefer to run the whole thing as a heritage railway anyhow.

Sometimes you'd think as much!

21% of March registrations were fully or hybrid electric (ie with an electric only mode) 8% full, 6% plug in hybrid, 7.5% hybrid. Market share has nearly doubled in a year. Hardly ‘tiny’ market penetration.

Hybrid is just a more efficient ICE car, even if you charge the batteries and run electric only, that's not going to make up most of the miles of an average user, unless it's basically an electric car with a range extender. Plus, registrations of vehicles in March isn't exactly comparable to the number of vehicles actually on the road.

The RAC estimates that, as of April 2021, there are around 239,000 zero-emission Battery Electric Vehicles on the UK's roads - with more than 100,000 registered in 2020 alone - along with 259,000 plug-in hybrids and 629,000 conventional hybrids. The following charts are the official (lagged) government figures for electric vehicles on the roads, and include cars as well as other forms of vehicle such as light goods vehicles.

That's less than 1% of vehicles on the road.

 

[Bletchleyite]

The DMU could carry maybe 100 people, though.

It could carry 300 people full and standing for all it wants to, but there is never going to be that sort of demand for Little-Piddling-in-the-Wold to Great-Rathole-on-Sea, even on a summer Saturday, if you see what I mean.

And really you want electrification to replace DMUs with EMUs. Plus, most people don't have electric cars - for that to happen we need, as I've explained, a grid expansion dwarfing any rolling electrification plan, which would solve the whole DMU issue.

That grid expansion (and other mitigations, like electronic remote control of charging so it's turned off when the grid is busy) will happen. The car is not going to go away, and to suggest it will is fanciful. The thing to work on is getting it out of the places where it causes most harm - the built up areas of cities, (edit: and the crowded National Parks like the Lakes and Snowdonia).

 

[GRALISTAIR]

A 20+ year rolling programme of electrification.

Is the right answer.

I actually would compromise and I am going to be slightly cynical/realistic (depending on your point of view) in my answer.

NR Traction Decarbonisation Network Strategy costed at 47 billion. Now (cynic on) - 60 billion pounds. 30 year programme - OK it takes us to 2051 not 2050 but I like round numbers. 60/30 = 2 billion a year. Allocate that and no more. However if one year only 500 million is spent then the next year the money would roll over to allow 3.5 billion etc. Let the Transport Select Committe review every 3 months and report back to SoS who then reports to parliament.

All good

 

[Purple Orange]

I would love to see dramatic rail system expansion and revitalisation - but the amount of money this would cost would be enormous.
There would also be a great many sacred cows to slaughter.

Hell I'm the person constantly proposing Shinkansen all over the place!


But we have to face the reality, given the mess the HS2 project has caused, and the desire of accountants to try and save pennies on design by provoking political arguments, no meaningful expansion will be possible - at least in the next few years.

I’m unsure how HS2 has caused a mess. Once people start using it I think there will be a huge call for greater investment in new rail infrastructure.

Quite the opposite. I think electric cars and electric buses are a huge threat to the non-electrified railway, and the railway will have to solve that before it does get closed down.

Perhaps this is where the railways will evolve. The UK has a very curious combination of having both a very comprehensive rail network and yet not comprehensive enough at the same time. We have all found ourselves in a country where regardless of the town you’re in, you expect that there is a train station. HS2 will be more than competitive with the car for many people for non-London journeys where they were not before, as long as there is the possibility of linking it up with NPR or Trans Pennine Route Upgrade and Midlands Engine initiatives.

Then we have commuter rail. The cities need to see electrification and they’ll get it. Manchester, Birmingham & Leeds need to see more radial lines electrified but there is no reason that won’t happen as we head towards a world where we must be carbon neutral.

Liverpool, Newcastle & Glasgow Rail journeys are predominately electric, therefore I do not see EVs affecting journeys on their networks.

Sheffield, Bristol, Cardiff need serious investment.

So I see the rail network evolving in to high frequency city commuting and high speed rail, focussed on HS2, the existing electrified mainlines and the Trans Pennine mainline (whether that be NPR or the existing line). There will be other lines electrified too (Bristol - Birmingham, Southampton - Birmingham, MML)

Slower long distance services, like Southampton/Reading to Manchester/Leeds direct (which struggles to compete with the car and air today and will certainly struggle with a change on to HS2 in Birmingham or OOC) will fall by the wayside.

 

[Mikey C]

That £27bn covers all costs for the Strategic Highway Network - operations, maintenance, safety schemes, renewals, future studies

The ‘enhancements’ element is £14bn. That’s compared to £9.4bn for enhancements for NR in a similar timeframe, which excludes spend on HS2, Crossrail, and some of EWR.



21% of March registrations were fully or hybrid electric (ie with an electric only mode) 8% full, 6% plug in hybrid, 7.5% hybrid. Market share has nearly doubled in a year. Hardly ‘tiny’ market penetration.



A threat yes, (buses in particular), but not a huge threat.

TfL are spending £700m on rebuilding Bank station alone, which puts the £1bn the Silvertown tunnel will cost (paid for by road tolls) into perspective.

The road programme (ignoring political hype) is pretty miniscule really. A few key projects, but most of the rest of the work is incremental improvement akin to the work Network Rail do all the time (e.g. the recent work at Kings Cross)

 

[HSTEd]

I’m unsure how HS2 has caused a mess. Once people start using it I think there will be a huge call for greater investment in new rail infrastructure.

By the time HS2 has had time to bed in, this will all be over one way or another!

The problem is that by trying to save money with large amounts of surface running, HS2 put itself into political trench warfare that has required the expenditure of substantial quantities of political capital and precious time.

 

[Purple Orange]

By the time HS2 has had time to bed in, this will all be over one way or another!

The problem is that by trying to save money with large amounts of surface running, HS2 put itself into political trench warfare that has required the expenditure of substantial quantities of political capital and precious time.

What will be over?

 

[HSTEd]

What will be over?

A large part of the transition, or necessary planning for the transition, will be over. Technological lock in will functionally have already occurred.

Or the transition will have failed and it won't really matter any more.

 

[doorhanger93]

That grid expansion (and other mitigations, like electronic remote control of charging so it's turned off when the grid is busy) will happen. The car is not going to go away, and to suggest it will is fanciful. The thing to work on is getting it out of the places where it causes most harm - the built up areas of cities.

I'm not saying it wont, eventually. What I'm saying is that investing in rail electrification and modal shifts now would save us a lot of money on expanding the grid later, because the reduction in energy use (and emissions) would give you much more bang for your buck in general compared to road car electrification. If there truly is this explosive EV adoption some seem to expect, we're going to be facing an actual power gap, but I think EV adoption will be slower than many expect and largely follow grid expansions. What this will do to electricity prices, though, is anyone's guess. It'd be funny if those strike prices the government has awarded Hinkley Point C actually become competitive! Ha, not likely.

NR Traction Decarbonisation Network Strategy costed at 47 billion. Now (cynic on) - 60 billion pounds. 30 year programme - OK it takes us to 2051 not 2050 but I like round numbers. 60/30 = 2 billion a year. Allocate that and no more. However if one year only 500 million is spent then the next year the money would roll over to allow 3.5 billion etc. Let the Transport Select Committe review every 3 months and report back to SoS who then reports to parliament.

I thought through something like this a while ago, £2B a year for 30 years; even the boondoggle electrification schemes only end up being around that £2B price point, and that's only about half or 2/3 of the yearly spend just on national roadways, let alone the whole road network, in recent years, ignoring recent road funding commitments. Obviously that's small compared to the overall cost of the railways, but even with a big margin for error you're still well within the realm of economic possibility - just impossible due to "political" reasons, still, it's important to point out when the political system makes something otherwise reasonable practically impossible.
Oh, how much greener would we have been if we swapped a few motorways for electrified main lines in the 60s?

A large part of the transition, or necessary planning, for the transition will be over. Technological lock in will functionally have already occurred.

Or the transition will have failed and it won't really matter any more.

I genuinely don't see why.

 

[Bald Rick]

Hybrid is just a more efficient ICE car, even if you charge the batteries and run electric only, that's not going to make up most of the miles of an average user, unless it's basically an electric car with a range extender. Plus, registrations of vehicles in March isn't exactly comparable to the number of vehicles actually on the road.

Noted, but they are still electric cars. I know people with PHEVs who only use fuel for long journeys - perhaps a couple of times a year.

That's less than 1% of vehicles on the road.

2% when you include the P/HEVs. And growing rapidly.

 

[Purple Orange]

A large part of the transition, or necessary planning for the transition, will be over. Technological lock in will functionally have already occurred.

Or the transition will have failed and it won't really matter any more.

The ‘transition’ will take a long time. And if you’re talking about EVs impacting rail usage, congestion in our cities will have a huge impact on that. There is not a cat in hell’s chance I would bother driving in to Manchester during rush hour and even outside of that time, the 10-12 mile drive that takes 30 mins without traffic plus time locating a parking space can’t compete with the 24 min train journey + 5-10 mins walk to the station.

 

[GRALISTAIR]

Biodiesel apart from all the land grab limitations should definitely be used for more difficult sectors like shipping.

 

[Bald Rick]

Oh, how much greener would we have been if we swapped a few motorways for electrified main lines in the 60s?

Practically nil. And we’d be much poorer.

 

[Purple Orange]

Practically nil. And we’d be much poorer.

I’d have swapped the Mancunian Way for some rail investment on the Castlefield corridor.

 

[doorhanger93]

Practically nil. And we’d be much poorer.

We'd be much poorer for having less dependence on oil during the oil crisis? We'd be so much poorer for going straight from steam to electric in a few more places instead of dealing with Modernisation Plan screwups inbetween? We'd be much poorer for lower car particulate emissions which kill millions around the world each year due to respiratory illness? We'd be so much poorer for avoiding the modern boondoggle schemes that have gone massively overbudget? We'd be so much poorer from having electrified lines that have already paid themselves back and are now just saving fuel? You forget that electrification is cheaper in the long run. Motorways do not generate much in the way of income, unless you own a concrete business, a car company, a road haulage company, or an oil company and are chummy with a government minister or two.

 

[coppercapped]

Currently government seem to be more interested in making space for increasing numbers of cars rather than nudging people towards public transport. That's something else that needs to change ASAP.

From where I'm sitting one would get entirely the opposite impression.

Under cover of the Covid pandemic (Emergency Active Travel Fund) my local council (Reading) has introduced or is consulting on some five significant schemes to re-allocate road space from motor vehicles to bicycles and pedestrians.

The net effect is that road traffic congestion has increased in these areas which benefits nobody, neither the local residents nor the people trying to get around as the Council's funding has not extended to other necessary measures. Examples of these would be moving supermarkets to more densely populated areas or improving bus linkages between parts of the town where the only way to make such a journey at the moment by public transport is by taking the bus to the town centre and then taking another radial bus route.

And even if a bus route does exist - it may suddenly be closed. A case in point - Reading Buses a few years ago made a lot of fuss about a consultation and then introduced with a great fanfare a bus route between the station, the town centre, the hospital and the University to some supermarkets (Aldi, Morrisons and Lidl) and a large area of light industry and social housing in south Reading. My wife and I benefited as it passed one of our local bus stops and we could use it to go shopping - although the car was still essential for heavy stuff.

And then, after all of six months or so, it vanished with practically no advance warning. This route ticked all the boxes - it made it easier for people living in socially disadvantaged areas to reach the hospital, it linked bits of the town directly without a detour, it increased the catchment area for students to find accommodation and made the daily shopping trip easier. Yet it was dropped - and Reading Borough Council which makes a great play about social separation and the climate emergency owns Reading Buses and yet still this route was closed.

Back to the car...

Unless and until public transport answers the same questions that private cars do, then all the talk about modal shift is just that - talk. It's virtue signalling of the most pernicious kind as it deflects attention from trying to understand what needs to be done to roll back the effects of many small incremental changes which have happened over the last 500 or so years and arguably since metallurgy became a thing in the Bronze Age some 4000 years ago.

'Net zero' carbon by 2030, or 2040? It's a joke - and anyway 'net zero' won't really get us anywhere - we really need to aim for 'negative carbon' if the greenhouse effect is to be reduced.

 

[doorhanger93]

Biodiesel apart from all the land grab limitations should definitely be used for more difficult sectors like shipping.

B100 is a tricky and expensive fuel that's far from carbon neutral, while still bringing a whole swath of environmental issues other than just carbon emissions. Obviously it's great for reducing emissions of current diesel vehicles, but long term we're going to have to find alternatives where batteries just don't scale and that's where I think hydrogen is really the best option, especially if one of the less energy-intensive solar or thermal (heated by high-temperature fission reactors) pathways ends up becoming viable, which would put green hydrogen prices more on par with that of current fossil-derived H2.

Although for long-distance shipping, something I support, but that will never happen, is greater adoption the most tried-and-tested green marine propulsion system. Since the 50s, it's been used greatly by the US, the USSR, Britain, France, China, Russia; even Germany and Japan gave it a one-off shot each. Its safety record is better than oil-fired ships (at least regarding the powerplant), it has zero emissions at point of use, and it's already competitive with diesel in some sectors due to actually having some advantages to justify its cost. That's right, nuclear fission.
When discussing green shipping, nuclear power is never mentioned, but it already exists and is highly successful - it's just waiting to be commercialized. Nuclear ships are faster, more compact, and have less empty weight than equivalent ships which have to lug enormous fuel tanks around. Nuclear ships have practically unlimited range; only requiring refueling every ten years or so, basically eliminating the need for conventional oil bunkering or "slow steaming" to save fuel. Obviously, nuclear ships almost eliminate fuel costs, as they may only use a tonne of uranium in those ten years - marine reactors were the original SMRs! There have actually been four nuclear merchant ships attempted, the American NS Savannah, the German Otto Hahn, the Japanese Mutsu, and the Russian Sevmorput. Unfortunately these ships generally failed as no port would agree to take them! Only Sevmorput still sails with her reactor, likely due Russian experience with their very successful fleet of nuclear icebreakers. They attempted to use her to resupply their Antarctic base last year, but unfortunately suffered issues with the propeller, and so now she lies in St. Petersburg harbour. While nuclear merchant ships don't quite seem practical now, they're certainly almost competitive with diesel, especially if there was greater global acceptance and standards for dealing with and insuring nuclear ships. While long-range hydrogen or ammonia shipping suffers from massive refueling infrastructure problems, nuclear excels in low-infrastructure areas - because needs so little refuelling, the actual expensive infrastructure can be significantly centralised, in fact Russia specifically built its icebreakers and Sevmorput as nuclear ships for operation in the ultra-low-infrastructure of the poles.
Still, it'll never actually happen due to the same reasons it never actually happened 50 years ago, exaggerated fear and exaggerated insurance (i.e. the blame game).

And then, after all of six months or so, it vanished with practically no advance warning. This route ticked all the boxes - it made it easier for people living in socially disadvantaged areas to reach the hospital, it linked bits of the town directly without a detour, it increased the catchment area for students to find accommodation and made the daily shopping trip easier. Yet it was dropped - and Reading Borough Council which makes a great play about social separation and the climate emergency owns Reading Buses and yet still this route was closed.

Your evidence that public transport is favoured over cars is that they closed a useful bus route? That doesn't seem to support your point. Just goes to show that even when great political fanfare is made, the car almost always takes priority.

Unless and until public transport answers the same questions that private cars do, then all the talk about modal shift is just that - talk. It's virtue signalling of the most pernicious kind as it deflects attention from trying to understand what needs to be done to roll back the effects of many small incremental changes which have happened over the last 500 or so years and arguably since metallurgy became a thing in the Bronze Age some 4000 years ago.

Public transport does answer most of the same questions - the big one being "how do you move people around". The car isn't some ancient thing that's gradually accumulated over 500 years - the car as mass transport only dates back to the 50s and 60s, when huge swaths of infrastructure were built to accommodate it. Most households didn't have a car until the 80s. Before these few decades, an essentially modern society functioned mostly on public transport as the means of moving people around, and specifically rail for moving goods. Modal shift isn't just talk, the modal shift to cars was a public policy within living memory, and it can be a public policy to partially reverse it. Plus, public transport doesn't have to entirely replace the car, just largely supplement it - many people on here already say they'd rather take the train than drive for certain journeys, that decision just needs to be expanded.

'Net zero' carbon by 2030, or 2040? It's a joke - and anyway 'net zero' won't really get us anywhere - we really need to aim for 'negative carbon' if the greenhouse effect is to be reduced.

I fully agree! That's why I say we kind of have to have this modal shift - the energy savings are dramatic, especially in a world where the vast majority of cars aren't even electric, and form the majority of emissions. At the rate we're going, net zero by 2050 is a joke - we need to utilise every tool we have, as fast as we can. Unless we'd rather drive now and be underwater later.

 

[GRALISTAIR]

I am a total nuclear fan but I dont have the power of god (thank god). But nuclear powered big container ships would be great. More nukes supplying the baseload on the mainland. Rolling program of rail electrification. Hydrogen and batteries for more niche applications. Biodiesel use down the list at it still produces CO2 and other particulates etc.

 

[ac6000cw]

Re. modal shifts over time - there are some interesting statistics for the period between 1952 and 2016 in this BBC article - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42182497

The standout statistic for me was the huge decline in bus/coach usage - from about 42% of total passenger km in 1952 to about 4% in 2016.

Private car passenger km went from less than 30% to about 85% by the late 1980s (and has stayed roughly constant since then, as has total car driven distance).

Rail passenger km went from 17% to 10%, with a low of about 5% in the mid-1990s (about when privatisation happened). Note that in 2016 it's 10% of a much larger 'pie', so actual rail passenger km was about twice that of 1952.

So if you managed to double rail modal share you would only reduce car usage by 10% or so - to about 75% of the total. I think handling that much extra passenger traffic would be very difficult on the busy routes without huge and disruptive capacity upgrades (inevitably most of the growth would happen on the already busy routes as they cater for the journeys lots of people want to make, otherwise they wouldn't be busy)

75% is about the modal share car travel has in Switzerland, which has probably one of the best integrated public transport systems in Europe and some of the highest rail modal share as a consequence, so it's a reasonable indication of how much modal shift you might achieve by improving public transport.

All this suggests to me that hoping modal shift will seriously de-carbonise the passenger transport system is just wishful thinking - de-carbonising road vehicles themselves has to be the main task, and railway de-carbonisation is pretty peripheral to the overall problem (but probably useful as political window dressing and to stop diesel trains becoming transport pariahs).

 

[JamesT]

We'd be much poorer for having less dependence on oil during the oil crisis? We'd be so much poorer for going straight from steam to electric in a few more places instead of dealing with Modernisation Plan screwups inbetween? We'd be much poorer for lower car particulate emissions which kill millions around the world each year due to respiratory illness? We'd be so much poorer for avoiding the modern boondoggle schemes that have gone massively overbudget? We'd be so much poorer from having electrified lines that have already paid themselves back and are now just saving fuel? You forget that electrification is cheaper in the long run. Motorways do not generate much in the way of income, unless you own a concrete business, a car company, a road haulage company, or an oil company and are chummy with a government minister or two.

What would our power generation have been based on back then? Much of our gas is a byproduct of oil extraction so would also have suffered in the oil crisis. Increased electricity demand back then would likely have been met by increased coal power, much dirtier.
Would we have been likely to choose 25kV AC then? Or follow Woodhead down the 1500V DC path, which would have required an expensive and disruptive rewire further down the road when the advantages of the higher voltage were realised? Or would it have been done on the cheap like the ECML which suffers far more dewirements than the modern GWML wiring.

There are economic benefits to everyone from cheaper and faster goods transport. Falling prices benefit all consumers. Same-day delivery directly from door to door provides an agility for companies. The increased mobility of the car allows specialists to visit multiple sites in a day, increasing productivity.

The vast majority of premature deaths from poor air quality around the world have nothing to do with road transport. It's from cooking or heating with solid fuels in the home, dirty power generation such as coal, or other heavy industry.

Earlier electrification of the mainlines would have been beneficial for all the trips that use them, but the ongoing issue with public transport is that it doesn't provide for the journeys that people actually want to make. The Didcot, Newbury, and Southampton railway could have been kept open, even though very few people used it, that would have prevented building the Newbury bypass on the route it took. But would we have seen an explosion in rail use, or just people clogging up the old route through the centre of Newbury?

I don't think anyone here is arguing that electrification of highly used routes (especially commuting into major cities) isn't worthwhile, but the reasoning to string wires up over the entire network is much more dubious. Electrification pays for itself on highly used routes, but how long is it going to take to pay back £270m to wire the Far North Line through not having to pay for diesel? Plus you've added an increased ongoing cost to maintain the wires.

What's needed with many of these discussions is an accurate economic measure for what it does actually cost society to have environmentally unfriendly things. Then people can make a more informed choice as to what the best method is of lowering emissions (or indeed of providing solutions that work against climate change, by capturing carbon dioxide from the air for example).

 

[GRALISTAIR]

Re. modal shifts over time - there are some interesting statistics for the period between 1952 and 2016 in this BBC article - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42182497
The standout statistic for me was the huge decline in bus/coach usage - from about 42% of total passenger km in 1952 to about 4% in 2016.
Private car passenger km went from less than 30% to about 85% by the late 1980s (and has stayed roughly constant since then, as has total car driven distance).

Rail passenger km went from 17% to 10%, with a low of about 5% in the mid-1990s (about when privatisation happened). Note that in 2016 it's 10% of a much larger 'pie', so actual rail passenger km was about twice that of 1952.

So if you managed to double rail modal share you would only reduce car usage by 10% or so - to about 75% of the total. I think handling that much extra passenger traffic would be very difficult on the busy routes without huge and disruptive capacity upgrades (inevitably most of the growth would happen on the already busy routes as they cater for the journeys lots of people want to make, otherwise they wouldn't be busy

75% is about the modal share car travel has in Switzerland, which has probably one of the best integrated public transport systems in Europe and some of the highest rail modal share as a consequence, so it's a reasonable indication of how much modal shift you might achieve by improving public transport.

All this suggests to me that hoping modal shift will seriously decarbonise the passenger transport system is just wishful thinking - de-carbonising road vehicles themselves has to be the main task, and railway decarbonisation is pretty peripheral to the overall problem (but probably useful as political window dressing and to stop diesel trains becoming transport pariahs).

Unless it is freight. One electric train of 70 containers must be better than 70 lorry journeys. modal shift of freight to rail would make a huge difference

 

[Bald Rick]

We'd be much poorer for having less dependence on oil during the oil crisis? We'd be so much poorer for going straight from steam to electric in a few more places instead of dealing with Modernisation Plan screwups inbetween? We'd be much poorer for lower car particulate emissions which kill millions around the world each year due to respiratory illness? We'd be so much poorer for avoiding the modern boondoggle schemes that have gone massively overbudget? We'd be so much poorer from having electrified lines that have already paid themselves back and are now just saving fuel? You forget that electrification is cheaper in the long run. Motorways do not generate much in the way of income, unless you own a concrete business, a car company, a road haulage company, or an oil company and are chummy with a government minister or two.

No we’d be much poorer as an economy. There is absolutely no doubt that motorways have helped grow our economy, and made it considerably more efficient, in much the same way that railways did a century earlier. Equally, there are some motorways that, on reflection, shouldn’t have been built, much like the railways a century earlier.

I don’t need a lecture about the benefits of electrification - I’ve put the stuff up myself!

Unless it is freight. One electric train of 70 containers must be better than 70 lorry journeys. modal shift of freight to rail would make a huge difference

It would - but...

Rail already has big mode share on key freight corridors. I forget the details, but as an example over a quarter of containers departing Felixstowe inland are on a train, and most of the rest aren’t going to places that are viable to serve by rail, either because there is a low flow, a short distance, or no railway. Where there is a reasonable flow, a decent distance and a railway, it’s market share is well above 50%, IIRC. That’s not to say there isn’t more to go at, but it’s certainly not transformative.

A very significant majority of the freight you see on the roads simply couldn’t transfer to rail.

 

[GRALISTAIR]

A very significant majority of the freight you see on the roads simply couldn’t transfer to rail.

Good lord, so we are screwed then?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Good lord, so we are screwed then?

Electric lorries?

 

[NoRoute]

Some of the predictions about huge electricity transmission and distribution costs for electrifying vehicles are likely to be over exaggerating the problem. If you look at electric demand it is quite variable and there's considerable spare network and generation capacity available over night and to a lesser extent outside of peak periods. Smart charging of EVs to shift consumption to off peak periods is reasonably simple, cost saving and will be incentivised. As long as smart charging is adopted the impact is manageable.

Importantly any costs are met by the private sector and bill payers rather than tax payers and the treasury.