Electric Freight Trains

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Originally Posted by Tote

And burning all that coal to produce the electricity to run them; so electrification is better how?

The NSW elecric locos were phased out as the coal trains started to be hauled without changing locos and the remaining collieries with electric haulage were the western line ones around Lithgow. As an aside the Western Mail used to be electric hauled to Lithgow and the diesel locos were attached to haul the train to Dubbo and Parkes. The shunting always woke me up as an apprentice going home from TAFE.

Pacific National currently haul double stacked containers from Parkes west and the inland line will be designed to accommodate this. US railways are not really comparable with Australia as the loading gauge is so much larger allowing double stacking and wider loads (no platforms in the US)

Australian railways also suffer from infrastructure designed and built in the 1800s such as tunnels and alignments that preclude modernisation at a reasonable cost. One of the advantages of the inland railway is that it will be able to improve efficiency at a more reasonable cost than upgrading other routes.

Regards,
Tote

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My son is a civil engineer. A couple of years ago he told me that any new infrastructure around rail lines (bridges and tunnels over and under) had to be designed to take double deck containers.

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Originally Posted by Old Farang

There are only a few hundred miles of electrified rail tracks in the US.(excluding suburban passenger networks).

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Not much in Australia either Only Queensland has heavy main line electric trains. Virtually all else are suburban commuter lines.

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Originally Posted by Bigbjorn

My son is a civil engineer. A couple of years ago he told me that any new infrastructure around rail lines (bridges and tunnels over and under) had to be designed to take double deck containers.

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There will be no double stacked containers into Sydney from Lithgow any time soon. There are 10+ tunnels through the mountains that would have to be reconstructed. This freight has to do the detour via Yass/Goulburn and up through the southern highlands.

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Originally Posted by DiscoMick

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Building a new inland line to the latest standards should be much cheaper than mucking about on the coast.

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Undoubtedly - but that means no access to Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane, all of which are on the coast, and for all of them, the cost of land acquisition means using the existing rail corridors.

Worth pointing out as well that while the Inland Rail from Melbourne to Brisbane is using some new corridors, for most of the distance it is using existing rail corridors, and often existing track. And some of the delays in construction can be attributed to problems with establishing new corridors, especially in the NSW Central West and Qld Darling Downs. (Local politics and NIMBY!)

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Originally Posted by cjc_td5

There will be no double stacked containers into Sydney from Lithgow any time soon. There are 10+ tunnels through the mountains that would have to be reconstructed. This freight has to do the detour via Yass/Goulburn and up through the southern highlands.

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As he said, NEW infrastructure has to be designed around the use of double deck containers. His concern is not the actual rail lines but the bridges and tunnels over and under the rail lines which have to be designed to clear double deck wagons.

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Originally Posted by JDNSW

Undoubtedly - but that means no access to Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane, all of which are on the coast, and for all of them, the cost of land acquisition means using the existing rail corridors.

Worth pointing out as well that while the Inland Rail from Melbourne to Brisbane is using some new corridors, for most of the distance it is using existing rail corridors, and often existing track. And some of the delays in construction can be attributed to problems with establishing new corridors, especially in the NSW Central West and Qld Darling Downs. (Local politics and NIMBY!)

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Isn't the plan to have freight centres at certain points and transfer the containers to local transport, either rail or road? Thought I read Lithgow was to be a freight centre.

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Originally Posted by PhilipA

EI read today that it cost 5 million pounds. It was an article on the BBC site about an older train set converted to hydrogen fuel cell.
regards PhilipA
the other issue of course is that h is made from natural gas.
nobody has worked out yet how to produce it “greenly”

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The is the UK older train conversion Phillip HydroFLEX Hydrogen-powered Train, United Kingdom
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...climate-change
The story is interesting as it sets out a cost of electrification in the UK as 750000 to 1000000 UK pound per kilometer (AUD$1,970,945.00 if at the upper end!
"Hydrogen-powered trains are less expensive, because they don’t require massive track overhauls and they can be created by retrofitting existing diesel trains. "

My poor maths guess puts Sydney to Melb 878km , Melb to Brisbane 1702km meaning overhead electrification costs a very rough
Melb - Brisbane $ 3,354,548,390.00
Melb (878)Sydney- (921) Brisbane $1,730,490,631.00

Cost of a Cordia Ilint or any of the American freight hydrogen train test are going to be well under 1/2 a billion.

Capturing the energy created during braking via regenerative braking rather than dissipating via resistors, the normal case today, reduces the amount of hydrogen that has to carried onboard the locomotive.) is already a part of EVs



20kg of hydrogen for range of 50-70 miles on the UK Hydroflex compared to French Coradia iLint 600 miles. Suspect the Americans with similar huge distances may be first with a H2 freight train.

Each of the new stories highlight the primary issues of the current main method creating hydrogen is from gas. With billions now being invested to be the first mover in Green or blue hydrogen with a R.O.I. to make this from a fairy tail to reality.

It is fairy tail until production of H2 is more efficient than just buring the gas to produce it as it is today [biggrin]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmQYQ-hm9aQ

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Originally Posted by DiscoMick

Isn't the plan to have freight centres at certain points and transfer the containers to local transport, either rail or road? Thought I read Lithgow was to be a freight centre.

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Parkes, actually - Lithgow is not on the Inland Rail. But essentially it is intended primarily as a bypass to Sydney for traffic that is Melbourne-Brisbane, Perth-Brisbane, and probably to some extent Perth -Melbourne.

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Originally Posted by Bigbjorn

As he said, NEW infrastructure has to be designed around the use of double deck containers. His concern is not the actual rail lines but the bridges and tunnels over and under the rail lines which have to be designed to clear double deck wagons.

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We once did a bridge replacement over the railway at Wallerawang, near Lithgow. It was going to cost heaps more to raise the bridge deck as a heap of approach roads would have to be raised as well. We ended up not raising the clearance to double container height due to the tunnels further east, and the fact that practically, they were never going to be raised so double stacked containers would never happen.

I have an idea that double stacked containers are used today from Perth (or somewhere near there) to Parkes. Maybe someone else knows for sure.