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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