the most revolutionary idea since Trevithick

[Etched Pixels]

We have the tech for fuel cell, but that fact nobody is actually using it for much should tell you something about how viable it is in the real world when the accountants have done the maths.

 

Steam on the other hand is alive and well, with new steam locomotives still being ordered, and in some situations building an equivalent diesel electric or similar for steep narrow gauge lines is proving near impossible as they can't get the performance they require under the weight limit.

[Hammer]

We have the tech for fuel cell, but that fact nobody is actually using it for much should tell you something about how viable it is in the real world when the accountants have done the maths.

 

 

BP has committed to supporting a hydrogen fuel network in California and the Netherlands, General Motors, Honda and Renault have fuel cell car programs and hydrogen buses are already in commercial production in the States. If the big boys have their accountants telling them to get on board, it's one to watch and certainly real-world viable.

 

While fuel cell cars are a few years away from being affordable and commonplace, the cost of larger modes of transport make the system extremely plausible. As with the German submarines and American buses.

There are also significant savings to be considered when you take into account the trend of oil prices upwards, not just in the UK but internationally.

 

The internal-combustion car didn't get everywhere over night either

[scots region]

Are you thinking of this ?

swiss electric steam tank loco

 

 

They were a wartime measure when coal was hard to come by but there was plenty of electicity from the hydro stations. The steam locos provided motive power for shunting on unelectrified tracks and when using electricity (they could also still be coal fired) were effectively large immersion heaters. If you used thermally generated electricity to power a steam loco, unless you could conceive of some kind of heat pump to heat the water, the overall thermal efficiency would be apallingly low as you'd go round the heat into work inefficiency cycle twice.

 

 

Bang! hit the nail on the head.

[cunningduck]

 

 

While fuel cell cars are a few years away from being affordable and commonplace, the cost of larger modes of transport make the system extremely plausible. As with the German submarines and American buses.

 

 

Just to qualify the submarine comment, they use it as a form of Air Independant Propulsion when underwater, so their alternatives are batteries and nuclear, not the internal combustion/remote generated electricity/steam alternatives that we are discussing here.

[Etched Pixels]

BP has committed to supporting a hydrogen fuel network in California and the Netherlands, General Motors, Honda and Renault have fuel cell car programs and hydrogen buses are already in commercial production in the States. If the big boys have their accountants telling them to get on board, it's one to watch and certainly real-world viable.

 

While fuel cell cars are a few years away from being affordable and commonplace, the cost of larger modes of transport make the system extremely plausible. As with the German submarines and American buses.

There are also significant savings to be considered when you take into account the trend of oil prices upwards, not just in the UK but internationally.

 

The internal-combustion car didn't get everywhere over night either

 

The submarine people use it because the exhaust fumes are quite acceptable which is a big issue when you have no exhaust.. The bus people have done a few stunts with it but nothing real in years, and the rest of it seems to appear from the car companies whenever anyone mentions tightening pollution rules, beating the car industry over the head with a stick, or giving them zillions of pounds of tax payers money for 'going green' (as opposed to taxng them for the mess they cause)

 

It's also pure greenwash in most environments. You replace burning oil with burning gas and coal, shipping it around the country losing lots of it in the wires and then wasting los of it in the pretty much unavoidable battery inefficiencies. Mix it with building a lot more nuclear or enormous amounts of extra wind power and maybe it makes a bit more sense (as with the French TGV emissions scores). The efficiency figures quoted are usually under 50%.

 

The simple truth is that as a medium for the storage of power gasoline is really quite stunningly efficient, and its one reason there are big research projects going on to try and create oil producing bacteria that could pull carbon out of the air and when fed the right other bits would produce oil.

 

Personally I'm thus not surprised the railway industry has shown minimal interest. In high traffic applications you might was well string wires, in low traffic applications nobody has yet build or shown any sign of building a light and effective battery/electric or fuel cell loco. The only really successful mainline battery locos in the UK have been for underground maintenance and of course the southern battery parcels units both of which are intended for short operating distances on battery.

[frobisher]

Hydrogen's incredibly flammable though - as in, explosive if it all goes wrong. Helium isn't so bad but I suspect wouldn't necessarily be able to produce the sort of heat a "modern" steam engine needs.

 

Helium, being non reactive short of fusion is a perfectly safe, if useless (presently) fuel source.

[scots region]

How about a 5NT? Have a conventional steam engine but wihtout a firebox or tubes and just open the top and chuck a handfull of uranium in the boiler and off you go!

 

 

HA HA HA, mac 3 locomotive, whoosh

[Guest Max Stafford]

I'm glad I looked into this thread. I was about to offer up a thread on alternative forms of motive power, other than diesel. Clearly overhead AC electric is the ideal system, but I wonder if there are any realistic contenders to replace diesel on non-electrified lines and as a contingency, should OHL supply be lost or disrupted. Fuel cell technology did cross my mind, but it seems to have run into a bit of a wall. I'm sure there are superior technologies to diesel traction, although they may already be in the hands of the energy giants just waiting the right moment. After all, to continue relying on an obsolete technology with a slowly declining fuel source would seem to be the antithesis of technological advancement.

That's pretty much how they portrayed steam traction fifty years ago and it's certainly relevant to hydrocarbon-fuelled IC technology - itself a 20th century relic for the most part.

 

Dave.

[peach james]

Sure, there is a fine one for replacing electric overhead, and it's called...wait for it... coal fired steam.

 

I view what was done in the modernization plan as being criminal in nature. What should have happened is creeping electrification, and ###### all diesels except DMU's, where they make sense. BR was in a position by 1954 that it had ordered enough new steam to make a serious inroad into the WW2 differred maintenance problems, and it was probably well set up to manage cascading large numbers of engines downwards as had been done historically. Especially if the Gronks and early DMU's had been deployed as they were, there was little need to dieselize with anything like the undue haste that it was undertaken with. The conditions required to allow for easy diselization were not there- the steam engines were not all superannuated, 30+ year old engines that had been through the great depression and the 2nd world war.

 

In a more modern application, I do not see anything as being "better" by enough to replace diesels. The price difference between 2GS (and 3rd GS) would not obliviate the manning penalties, even with coal being something under 1/3rd the price per BTU of diesel. The difference in fuel price would have to be higher than that, and at that point electrofication becomes far more attractive, because fuel costs are less. It's hard to beat Drax or similar at converting thermal energy to useful work- even though there are a lot of 97% efficient steps in the way of getting the power to the loco, that 50% one vice a 30% one is a fair deal killer- not to mention the fact that most of the rest of the junk is being used by both DE and straight electric.

 

James