Electrification is not that expensive

Trains Magazine General Discussion
21

I’d multiply your number by 5x, Paul, if we’re talking large-scale, after we figure in all the changes to wayside signaling, grade-crossing signaling, industry spurs, terminals, overpasses, tunnels, environmental permitting, distribution and generation systems, communication systems, impacts on other industries and systems and communities, transit systems, passenger corridors, rolling stock, stations, maintenance facilities, skill sets, training, ad infinitum. It’s not just a matter of stringing wire any more, if we’re doing a lot of it.

It’s fairly easy to build a boutique electrification on a single helper district or subdivision, because you can do everything as a special case. Doing it on 25,000 miles is basically turning everything upside down. The experience with PTC to date has been instructive in that regard.

RWM

22

[tup] As I said above - ‘We don’t have enough money in this country to do it.’ That - 500 Billion Dollars - is almost a whole 'nother stimulus fund. [And thanks for confirming my also above-noted respect for your knowledge and listing of all those ‘other’ items.]

  • Paul North.
23

…and you can be sure the power plant is located outside the state of California (so you can eliminate the point source of the emissions in their warped little minds), plus you waste tons of energy transmitting the power back into the state on a broken down and worn out grid system[(-D][(-D][tdn]

24

First you must install, protect from the public, and maintain a high voltage overhead wire distibution system. (third rail will not work for long distance electrification) You must buy electricity from a power company. Power in France, 80% Nuke, 20% Hydro, China is building 60 new Nuke Power Stations, Power Stations in the USA are 50% Coal. You must inspect the wire (each day??) and replace the Catenary “Contact Wire” often. You will need a “Diesel powered Wire Train”.

Electrics cost much more to build than Diesel, low volume, custom designed, and dealing with Very High Voltage. But, they last much longer, 30 or more years. When they are done they are done, no secondary market.

Buy a new, mass produced Diesel from GE or EMD, run it 10 years and sell it to a Regional Railroad. They run it another 10 years and sell it to a Short Line Railroad, then its retire to a Tourist Line. A whole Secondary Industry has grown up around rebuilding road diesels.

25

Since the critical assumption is that an overhead power distribution is a given, it would be interesting to consider the cost outlay as well as the practicality of over or under running third rail distribution versus overhead. Didnt the NYC use this?

26

The costs of electrification are substantial. The catenary and power network are about the same as building a new track from scratch. As others have posted, additional costly clearance issues are faced with bridges and tunnels. In urban areas, this has been mitigated to some extent by elevated tracks - the Yin and Yang of building road underpasses so the railroad is stuck with maintenance costs. Even so, raising bridges or lowering tracks may profoundly affect nearby structures, adding substantial costs for modification or dislocation.

While a sharp dip (or rise?) in the tracks may not affect a non-electrified train, pantograph-catenary interaction may require reducing speed as for the Metra Electric at a number of locations.

Electric locomotives are more expensive too - don’t ask me why. It seems you’d trade the turbo-charged 12-16 cylinder diesel for a transformer. Dual cabs would not add that much if that is the case; or do the trains run push-pull fashion? Straight electrics should not cost as much with standardized production as the custom-made $8M NJT units and the need for fewer higher-horsepower replacement units. BNSF is putting more pull on each axle with an A-1-A + A-1-A 4,500 hp unit which seems to be the current practical limit for railroad diesels. 6,000 hp is still a bridge too far, even though a French builder offered a then-astounding 5,600 (metric?) hp unit some 30 years ago in a Railway Gazette ad.

27

I hear so much about that electrification is too costly and too impossible to maintain, but just taking a general look around the world most modern countrys find electrifying the railroads the most cost effective. Most of Europe especialy Germany the powerhouse of the European ecconamy, Japan, China and India are electric or in the process of being. The costs are also exagerated by assuming one would electrify every mile, one would not electrify duplicate routes or branch lines, easpecialy the ones where you don’t run through power anyways. Of course there is no resale market for electric locomtives now, but once routes become electric then there would be. As far as electric locomotives being more expensive to build new doesn’t make much sense unless perhaps they are high speed locos wich would cost more then heavy low speed diesels. A good low voltage DC electric motor is nothing but a diesel electric without the cost of the prime mover.

I’m not sugesting the government take over or anything like that to electrify the railroads, I’m just questioning the logic that we use to avoid electrifying. I suppose I understand why we can’t afford it , but perhaps I don’t understand why everyone else can.

28

In a previous thread, I commented that much of the European and Asian electrification began before WWII, and needed to be rebuilt. Many of the steam locomotives had been damaged or destroyed. What’s more, these countries had coal, but little oil resources, that led to coal-fired electric power and further electrification, building on the existing network.

We’ve had the discussion before about horsepower. A 1,000 hp switcher is one application; but consider how many 4,000 hp units are needed for a 60 mph mainline freight.

Another strike against a low voltage dc locomotive is the transmission loss and voltage drop in a comparatively short distance. A substation is needed about every 5 miles for a 1,500 v system compared to about every 25 miles for a 25,000 v system.

29

OK, fair enough. For starters, compare the distances between a couple of the bigger cities in Germany, Japan, and then in France. Maybe also do Switzerland and Italy. [Make sure they’re all in miles.]

Next, compare those distances with the distances between New York City and Chicago, NYC and Boston, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, Chicago and Dallas, Seattle and Los Angeles, and any others you care to choose.

Then, see if there’s a relationship in the magnitude of the distances in the U.S. as compared with those in Europe. In my experience, that’s a common fallacy among people from Europe when they come to the U.S. for the first time - esp. those from Germany. They have no sense of the scale of this country - they think they can easily drive from NYC to Dallas in a day.

As for the other countries that you reference - India and China - they are much larger, and I’m not familiar enough with the specific routes there to know if the relationship holds out there as well.

To go to the next level of sophistication [which still isn’t much], then look at the relative population densities - persons per square mile or square kilometer - for each of those metropolitan areas. Again, observe if there’s a relationship.

Finally, although you claim to eschew government ownership and funding of electrification, each of the countries that you mention has, I believe, installed electrification either as a state-owned railroad, or with significant government funding. In several of those, it was a component of rebuilding from World War II’s devastation, which practically took a generation to achieve. The differences between those situations and ours, I think, explain much.

I’m pro-electrification. But doing it in the U.S. is on a scale with first building the railroad network, or t

30

As stated Europe is not a good example because of the distances. Try comparing the US to Russia and you will see very many similarities. Beside France and many countries get most of their power from nuclear plants. The greenies here want us all in candle lit caves like Bin Laden. I predict brownouts and general power shut downs in areas in the very near future since most of power plants are operating well beyond their life expectancy now at power rates well in excess of design. Can’t build nuclear because of Three Mile Island (it worked). Can’t build fossil fuel plants ( Global warming even though the temperature has dropped for ten consecutive years now). Can’t build anything because a bug or frog is more important then life as we know it. Electrifying anything isn;t going to happen.

31

I only have to go to the nearest track to see electric trains, but I prefer diesel locomotives from a railfanning perspective. With electrics, you never quite know how hard an engine is working to move the train. Diesel: just open your ears hehe. It just adds to the perception of power of locomotives… In contrast, electric engines will only tell you their are fuctioning. Whether or not the throttle is on full or not you just can’t say. Of course you do know the engine had to work too hard when the overhead wire snaps from the heat…

32

Allow me, as a European, to add my [2c] to this issue.

In most European countries, electrification started around 1910 and is not yet fully accomplished. All main lines are, however, run by electric traction. European higspeed intercity traffic would be unthinkable without electrification. Railroads were (and still are, despite all efforts to de-regulate and privatize) state-owned businesses, their infrastructure having been paid for by the tax payer. Over the last 100 years, railroads have always been losing money, even if the now published balance sheets tell you differently. Just transfering expenses to the tax payer´s pocket book to clear up the P&L statement is just not enough… [:D]

Europe has much more of a railroad history and mentality than the US. One reason may be the much shorter distances of travel, although you can take a train nowadays all the way from Narvik on the Arctic Circle down to Cadiz in Spain, and that is a heck of a distance. As we all travel by train one day or the other, public awareness of trains is much higher . Investments into trains have never been really disputed in public - a quite comfortable situation.

I guess the picture in the US is very much different from this. Passenger travel has been on a constant decline - a 2-day travel by train vs. a 2 hour flight is just no option anymore. Freight traffic is still very much intense, but to my understanding more of a hub-to-hub thing than a collect-and-distribute affair.

Electrification of the US railroad is such a big task and certainly not not possible for profit oriented carriers to finance. IMHO, it makes only sense, if truck traffic is reduced to a minimum as a consequence, the power is generated through re-generative sources, like solar energy, wind energy or hydraulic energy.

Even if all that can be achieved, there is so much infrastructure to be built up and so much equipment to be manufactured that I still question this step to be CO2 neutral, at best. <

33

I enjoyed your post![tup]

About half of the traffic is non-unit train, non-intermodal, “loose carload” traffic still. It’s still profitable, but grows more slowly than the economy as a whole. The growth engine for frt RRing in the US is intermodal.

34

Another thing about electrification in certain sovereign nations - the decision was made by bureaucrats who simply didn’t consult the general public, and once the decision was made, anything which might have slowed the juggernaut’s march was simply swept under the rug. Check out what happened to Chapelon’s work in France. As for China, disagreeing with the central authorities there can be hazardous to your health.

Then, too, note that France didn’t go nuclear for fear of ‘global warming.’ It was simply that you can’t power trains with on-board reactors, and the prices for fossil fuels were going orbital. Likewise, Japan now imports all but a miniscule percentage of the fossil fuels it uses.

Pick almost any of the ‘developed’ countries, and superimpose its map on that of the US. There aren’t many that won’t fit comfortably between the Mississippi River and the Front Range. THAT is the big obstacle to railroad electrification in the USA - all of those miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles.

Chuck

35

In terms of territorial boundaries, I have to agree with you, Chuck. Talking about the flow of merchandise, you have to take Europe as a whole, unfortunately divided into various systems, like DC in France, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Poland , etc, and AC in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, etc. The newer generation of electric locos is now equipped to cope with the varous national standards, but that has not been the case until the late 1990´s.

As for passenger service, I´ll recommend to take a train from Narvik in northern Norway to Cadiz in Spain - that´s roughly the same distance as from Seattle to Miami. All of that is run by electric trains… [:)]

36

Madog,

this is not precisely true. In my country for example, the main passenger railroad company has been privatized. There is no government check going into their coffers. The infrastructure is still owned by the government and the railroad companies pay usage fees.

I believe more countries in Europe have this kind or a similar setup. Britain comes to mind.

On electrification, I believe the only reason this has been done in Europe at all is because the major railroads were all owned by the governments. For the Netherlands I’ve been told the reason for electrification was the fact that coal was no longer in ready supply without importing it and as such, electrification made some sense. If the railroads would have been privately owned, that might not have happened in favor of diesel traction. Anyway, they could do whatever they wanted, even if that meant undertaking an investment that made no sense financially. As a result, most of Europe was “under the wire” by the time the privatization and open rail processes started.

We do still struggle with the patch work of different currents and voltages, different safety and signalling systems, wire height above railhead and even third rail electrification instead of overhead wire. This is exactly the reason most internationally operating freight carriers in Europe use diesel traction on their border crossing trains. It’s simply the easiest and in the long run most cost ef

37

… two answers to that.

In most countries in Europe, railroaders were employed by the government with nice pensions. Following the privatisation, the railroads were just stripped of their financial burdens for the retired employees. This is a heavy subsidy.

Second issue is, that the usage fee for state owned rail infrastructure is not anywhere near the cost - where that leads to, we have seen in Great Britain.

38

I thiink Eurpeans realized early that it was easier and cheaper to deliver the power to a locomotive via wire from few locations than by the ton or gallon from many locations. Also, the tractive effort of electric propulsion worked well in the mountainous and hilly terrain packed into the area, not to mention the problem of pollution from both coal and diesel. Great Britain is the size of our 5 New England States and the whole of Europe would stretch from the Atlantic Ocean almost to the Mississippi River. Comparing railroading…and its attendant philosophies…in the two geographical diverse contenents is too disparate to prove anything.