Battery trains fool’s gold

A piece by the railway news video Green Signals recently reported the fast charging trials for battery operated electric trains on the West Ealing to Greenford branch, in west London. In a comment under the video, I described the project as technological overkill, bearing in mind that before dieselisation in the 1960s it was worked by the tiny steam locomotives of the Great Western 1400 class, a 1932 design based on an 1870s design. The money that has been spent on the experiment would have paid for a small fleet of the old things. Elsewhere in the comments, I was critical of the 800 series trains. This produced a response from the makers of the video, as follows.

“I may be grasping at straws here but I am guessing you don't like 8xx series trains all that much and rather wish we still had Kings, Castles and (for the branches) 14xx's. Fair?”

My reply was as follows...

Yes you are grasping at straws. The model for long distance stock is the class 180, which is a 23 metre vehicle with a bay dimension of the golden figure, 1.9 metres, which gives a proper alignment of seats and windows, and luggage space between seat backs, where it will not get stolen. This appears to have been based on the 1986 BREL International, and was, I understand produced by a member of the same design team then at the Derby Technical Centre. The best of the bogie designs remain the B4, BT10 and T3-7 (the one under the class 442).

We need a new design of electric locomotive to power them. Obvious choices would be the Traxx or Vectron for the UK gauge. 

The 26 metre vehicles of the 800 series with small wheeled bogies at 17 metre centres are a flawed concept. I understand that they are track bashers. The poor ride quality would suggest this. The wide spacing between the vehicles and the rooftop clutter makes for poor aerodynamics, the seats are dreadful and getting off these trains can be perilous due to the step gap and poorly placed handrails.  Short fixed formation trains are a dumb idea, especially when they do not have through gangway connections. So is the use of wide extruded aluminium planks for bodyshells, and that is for a long list of reasons, and yes I am well aware that it is done for the convenience of the manufacturers.

With 120 oiling points, and “fancy boilers” the GW four cylinder designs would not be my preferred choice of steam locomotive for present day use. I would be looking for something cheap and cheerful, perhaps similar to the LNER B1, or Southern S15, of course with light oil firing, high superheat, modern exhaust system and comfortable, German style fully enclosed cab.

For routes which are not worth electrifying, the gradual introduction of this traction would hugely improve the economics of the railways, which are currently burdened with the capital costs of absurdly expensive modern rolling stock. Remember that most trains spend a significant proportion of their service life doing nothing at all, including being laid up in store for long periods, as your own series has reported. The capital and interest charges still have to be met when the trains are parked out of use.

As regards lightly used routes, if something like a 1400 class will do the job (that design is based on an 1870s type), why spend fortunes on technological overkill? As far as zero carbon is concerned; the industry should refuse to play the expensive game. They account for 0.7% of UK carbon emissions.

Link to video

 

The Fiscal Black Hole

Richard Murphy, the accountant and policy analyst, has just produced a video on the fallacy of the £20 billion black hole in government finances. It is worth watching, but can you spot the hole in his argument?

Murphy is partly correct, but also dangerously misleading. He has forgotten that there is a fixed supply of some things, such as land, which all buildings require—homes, factories, shops and offices. Creating money too freely leads to a land price boom. This was the main long-term effect of Quantitative Easing. It sent house prices sky high. 

The notion that unemployment is due to shortage of aggregate demand is the great Keynesian fallacy. If Murphy understood the idea of the NAIRU (the Non Inflationary Rate of Unemployment), which has been around since 1959, he would know that pushing money into the economy cannot get rid of unemployment without causing accelerating inflation. Money has lost 98% of its value since 1945. It is one of the reasons why Britain's industry has all but disappeared.

Governments can indeed create unlimited money but it then needs to be withdrawn from circulation through the tax system. When the tax system punishes honest work and wealth creation, it is not fit for purpose, but that is what we have had for the past 80 years.

The link to the video is here.

The case for locomotive hauled trains and refurbishing old rolling stock

 This discussion arose from a YouTube comment.

“Keep operating super old locomotives is not exactly environment-friendly or even cost-efficient.”

This is true as a broad generalisation. However, the energy consumption of rolling stock and infrastructure has to be calculated over its entire life cycle, from mine to scrapyard. I cannot lay my hands on the figures, but I understand that at least a third of the energy consumed by a train occurs in mining and refining the raw materials and construction of the vehicles. Large amounts of energy are used to just to dig out and transport the minerals and convert the ore to aluminium metal, while aluminium welding is also an energy-intensive process. Aluminium mining is not environmentally friendly. Similar considerations apply to electrification infrastructure and battery technologies.

As regards cost, around a third of the total is for the capital costs of the rolling stock. This is usually reckoned to be fully amortised after 20 years, after which the costs are reduced to just the marginal costs of maintenance, overhaul and refurbishment. Since rolling stock has to be robust enough to withstand the arduous railway environment, it will last for 60 years with a mid life refurbishment. This is why we still see elderly trains in service, for example, locomotive types such as the British classes 20, 37 and 73, German class 232, the Swedish type RC, and various trains on London Underground. It cannot be economic to scrap serviceable rolling stock when replacement of some of the components is all that is needed.

“Newer engines can dramatically decrease energy consumption.”

Indeed. Trains such as the British IC 125 stock, the class 56 diesel electric locomotives and the class 73 electro-diesels have been fitted with new engines from EMD and MTU, which not only cleans up the emissions but also makes them more powerful.

“Besides if the train is too short, then using a heavy locomotive to haul it would cost a lot of extra overheads.”

It might, but a locomotive capable of hauling 3 carriages should not weigh more than about 70 tons, and the carriages themselves will be lighter as they will not have the heavy traction equipment built in. A slightly larger and heavier locomotive – say 80 tons, will be able to manage 6 coaches, of which some can be taken out of service when they are not required, and this is a useful opportunity to carry out tasks such as cleaning and maintenance. There is a further issue – the spread of on-train signal systems such as ERTMS. This is extremely expensive and has to be installed on every train capable of running independently. It makes economic sense to fit it all into a single vehicle – a locomotive.

“You can of course only hook for example 3 carriages to a loc, but that won't really decrease carbon footprints. A 3-car MU would draw much less power and use weaker but adequate engines.”

Railway operation accounts for 0.7% of total UK carbon emission. It isn’t even worth the effort thinking about it. However, if decarbonisation of the railways adds to costs or makes rail less attractive in other ways, then the result will be increased emissions.

SNCF shutdown should be a wake-up call

The recent large scale shutdowns on French railways have been variously attributed to hostile action, terrorists, leftist agitators and Russians, but similar incidents have occurred by accident. A few years ago a small fire in an equipment cupboard shut down train services over a wide area around Gothenburg, and it took a fortnight to get things back to normal.

A couple of weeks ago there was the worldwide dislocation caused by an upgrade of Windows computer systems which went wrong. Similar large scale disruption to electronic systems can also be due to natural events such as solar storms. Total shutdown of tills in shops throughout Sweden are common, apparently because of a failures of the VAT central computer system.

Critical infrastructure such as transport, water supply, mains drainage, electricity and gas are all vulnerable. 

Until a few decades ago, the signals and points at Brighton were controlled from a signal box at the end of the platforms. If anything went wrong, the staff in charge could seen out of the window and fix it on the spot Then the signal box was closed and the control was moved to a signalling centre at Three Bridges, 25 miles away. When communication is lost, there is little that can be done by those on the ground.

This ought to be taken a as a wake-up call, but it won't be.

A thought about money

I noticed that there has been a flurry of discussion recently about what is known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)). It strikes me as a bit half-baked but the proponents of MMT may have a point.

The usual view is that governments collect tax and spend it to pay for their activities. I believe this is exactly the wrong way round. As I understand it, official money is created when government spends it into circulation to cover its expenses. The money must then be withdrawn from circulation through the tax system, so as to complete the cycle and prevent the undue increase in the quantity of money which leads to a general increase in prices as the value of money falls.

Now, it is essential to remember that one of the core functions of governments is to protect land rights and provide what is needed to make land habitable and productive, thereby creating sustaining its value. The government‛s primary duties are to defend the realm, protect land titles, make justice available to the people and provide the infrastructure which enables production. Without these, land would be of little value. In addition, service provided such as education and healthcare also enhance land value; one need only compare house prices in the vicinity of good schools to observe this effect.

It follows from this that the principal form of taxation should be on land, as measured by its market rental value.

Overdue policies that will probably not happen

A handful of overdue policy reforms would alleviate many of the long standing problems that afflict the British economy. This are

Rationalisation of property taxation including

• Reform of the Council Tax
• Abolition of Stamp Duty
• Abolition of Capital Gains
• Business Rates to annual assessments and will with fixed equipment, buildings and plant being ignored in the valuation. 

Phasing out of VAT

Significant raising of thresholds for income tax and NI contributions.

Scrapping of VAT over a couple of years; it is damaging, inefficient and a solid obstacle to growth. 

Even if these changes were revenue-neutral, great benefits would follow. Of course, even though Labour has a huge majority in parliament, little or none of this will happen.

When the wind blows, the trains stop

For the second time this week, trains on many routes in the west of Sweden have been cancelled due to high winds: this happened on Sunday morning (7 July) and again this afternoon (10 July).

Apparently there is a risk of trees falling on the overhead electrification cables, and of the cables themselves getting blown down. The cables come down regularly; a couple of times a week, it is said. I have personally been caught up in two incidents. In the first, the train was stuck in a forest for four hours when the wires came down. This was on a lovely afternoon in July and passengers could enjoy the sun and opportunity to walk their dogs. The stay in the forest was so long because it took two hours to couple a rescue locomotive to the train. A month ago the passengers were ordered off a Copenhagen to Gothenburg train because the wires had been stolen, and that journey ended up with an overnight stay in a hotel.

Which raises two questions. Why are trees allowed to grow where they are an obvious hazard? In steam days the trackside had to be kept clear because of the risk of fires. On electrified lines, the risk of disruption due to trees falling on the track is even greater.

The second is why are the lines electrified at all? Now that electricity is priced on the Europool market, it is not cheap, and there are many lines where there is not enough traffic to justify the cost of putting up the wires and keeping them in order, which is an onerous task in itself.

Perhaps some of this electrification infrastructure should be removed when it is life expired?

New tri-mode locomotive is exactly wrong

The Stadler class 93 locomotive is a tri mode (diesel/25kV electric/battery) unit intended for both freight and passenger train haulage. Its power is given as 6200 hp on electric traction, 1250 hp on diesel and 540 hp on batteries. Its main purposes is to haul high speed intermodal freight while avoiding diesel running under the wires, with diesel and battery power for the ʻlast mileʼ.

This looks good but is exactly wrong. It is, presumably, a very expensive piece of kit, each one probably costing over £3 million. It that looks like it is brutal on the track - tiny wheels and a 21 ton axle load are a recipe for heavy wear. 

Freight trains should not be traveling at high speeds. It wastes energy and damages the track - the modern container carriers with small wheels are track-bashers, and modern passenger trains are also destructive to the point that it is becoming a real problem; the poor state of the track is evident on, for instance, the Great Western Main Line. 

Electricity does not come out of the sky. Supplies will have to be enhanced to get rid of diesel running under the wires, and overall thermodynamic efficiency goes down. 

The advent of this design points yet again to look at using steam as a benchmark. The 9F freight locomotive delivers over 3000 hp when using coal and about 20% more on diesel fuel. The initial cost of a steam locomotive would probably be a quarter of that of the tri-mode and much the same to run.

As a production locomotive, a new design of three-cylinder 2-8-2 would be a stiff competitor, or another build of the proven 9F class, though the track would have to be modified to allow them back on the national network.

Equal rights for women in Sweden are history

Last Sunday was a Muslim festival, and the Gothenburg city council allowed this to be celebrated with public prayers in Slottskogen, one of the city parks. There was a huge turnout, as the picture shows. How many women can you count?

Who to vote for?

I intend to vote for Reform (if the postal voting form arrives in time) but their policies are not up to dealing with the problems that face the country. These have their roots in the theories that have been current for the past 100 years in the departments of economics in Oxbridge and the London School of Economics, and which circulate within the civil service and and the government. Until these theories are recognised as bogus, policies which might succeed are simply not available to whoever gets elected. 

At their root is the notion that government revenue should be raised primarily from taxes on productive and legal economic activity. This is ultimately self-defeating, since it leads to a death spiral. The present mania for bringing ever more people into the country is a desperate attempt to escape the inevitable. The system was never viable, and much government spending has had to be financed by inflation; sterling has lost 98% of its value since the end of the war, and there are other countries which have even worse records for inflation than Britain.

Whether the country has the stomach for making the necessary changes is doubtful. Reform seems unlikely to take the initiative in the right direction, which means that it will inevitably disappoint.

What is this weird lightweight train for?

Revolution VLR is a project for ultra lightweight trains for use on routes where traffic is relatively light. It is described as

“an innovative, lightweight, cost-effective rail vehicle that provides a compelling alternative to operating traditional heavy rail vehicles on branch lines. Its low mass reduces all aspects of operating costs and can significantly improve the business cases for line reopenings and extensions, enhancing local connectivity. RVLR’s innovative design combines automotive and rail technologies to provide an attractive, environmentally and economically sustainable product that can be deployed rapidly. RVLR facilitates modal shift and enhanced public transport connectivity. It supports a more affordable, greener future for our railways.”

I look at this and scratch my head. What were the designers thinking of? It is a curious design, with vehicles only 18.5 metres long (when the standard mark 1 length of 20 metres can run over the entire British system and another metre of length is probably possible. It appears to have no means of coupling it to another vehicle or locomotive, at least not in regular use. There is what looks like cramped seating for 56, and standing for 26. It compares unfavourably with the trains provided for this kind of service in the past, such as the GWR Auto trains which were used on little branch lines, and main line stopping services a century ago. These were 21.5 metre vehicles; those built in early BR days had extremely comfortable seating.

What is it for? There are hundreds of quite modern EMUs and DMUs coming out of service which have driving trailer cars which could be converted for use as control trailers for push-pull service for this kind of operation. Traction is another issue but the power requirements are about what was needed to run the GWR Auto-trains, which were pushed or pulled by very small steam locomotives such as the 1400 class.

A single de-rated HST power car (which would otherwise go for scrap) could handle up to three coaches with ease, with years of useful service ahead, so that passengers would not have be crammed in and stand, and there would be plenty of space for wheelchairs, prams and bicycles.

Dare one say it – very small steam locomotives such as the 1400 class used for auto-trains are very cheap to build, given a production run of 20 or more; when fuelled with light oil or diesel they actually use less fuel and produce a clean exhaust, and have a 60+ years life. 

The project, sponsored by Eversholt Rail and Transport Design International, seems to be a good example of an inability to see wood from trees or to learn from history. Given the number of GWR Auto-trains which survive, one of these should at least have been brought out for use as a cost/performance benchmark. Whatever traction is used, the total carbon footprint of the operation is minuscule – just 0.7% of the UK total – in the overall scheme of things – the carbon footprint of this project is probably bigger when everything is factored in, including embedded energy. One would have thought that there were still a few people left at Eversholt Rail who were aware how this kind of thing was done in the past, but seemingly not. You can read about it here.

Railway ticket and fares shambles

Once upon a time, a train ticket was a small piece of thick card which you bought at the station when you wanted to travel. You would turn up a few minutes early in case there was a queue at the ticket office, which was staffed by a human being who knew his job. Then you waited for your train and made your journey. And that was all.

Nowadays, except for local journeys, you have to book in advance and have to travel in a particular train. You might have to buy the ticket on a mobile phone, or else you will have to negotiate a terminal with a confusing and poorly designed touch screen, with every train company having a different layout and programme flow.

There is a bewildering variety of tickets and prices. In the latest version of the Swedish Railways (SJ) booking system, there is no means of changing your booking or getting a refund if something crops up. You have to allow an extra half hour or more to be certain of catching the train you have booked for. The railways have adopted one of the worst features of airline practice.

Why has this happened? In the first place, it seems as if railway are managed by people who do not use the system themselves and do not understand what railways are about. In the second place, they are desperate to get rid of staff as half of the labour costs of any business consists of tax. Thirdly, they have got themselves into a position where what is known as ‶yield management″ has to be exercised to the highest degree. 

The railway have always done yield management. As early as the 1840s, excursion trains were run on Sundays, to make use of rolling stock that would otherwise have been standing idle in sidings. Later on, the principle was applied by keeping a reserve of old rolling stock which would otherwise have been scrapped; some of this was parked in remote locations over the whole of the winter season, to be brought out for the busy summer timetable. 

These spare carriages could be brought into service at short notice; photographs of trains in the 1920s often show one or two old vehicles at the front, which would have been attached at the last moment if a lot of passengers turned up. Timetables had built-in slack to allow for the extra weight of these ad-hoc additions, while steam locomotives could, at need, be worked harder than their normal design capacity.

From the 1960s onward, the practice of using fixed formation set trains like the British Inter-City 125 came in, though these were more flexible than subsequent trains, since the carriages themselves were relatively simple trailer vehicles which could be added or removed to suit the traffic. Older rolling stock was simply scrapped instead of being kept as a reserve.

Thus, the railway having got themselves into a straitjacket, have to match a fixed supply to a highly variable demand, which is the root cause of the current user-hostile fares and ticketing systems. Even so, simplification is possible. There is no reason for tying passengers to particular trains; in most situations, a two-tier fares structure - peak and off-peak - should suffice to even-out demand to the fixed supply. In the longer term, the railways need to return to the older practice of retaining a reserve of stock which can be stored without deterioration for several months at a time.