tisdag 16 juli 2019

Not as green as it looks

There are hundreds of miles of electrified railway in Sweden where there are a handful of trains – one or two an hour, and in some cases just a dozen a day. It is generally considered that a railway is not worth electrifying if there are less than six trains per track per hour. The embodied energy in all the overhead structures and the copper cable is colossal. If you travel in the north of Sweden in the winter, you can see a constant shower of sparks which is a continual waste of energy. These routes – eg Gothenburg-Strömstad – should never have been electrified in the first place, but useful amounts of energy could be saved by recovering the fixed equipment (which could be put into store for re-use) and using diesel locomotives, or even steam locomotives, which can be ‘green’ since they can run on renewable fuels such as waste material from the timber industry.

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