Hydrogen Traction Power for Rail

As the railways face a need to eventually replace diesel rolling stock and demonstrate environmental sustainability, we aim to highlight the opportunities and challenges of developing a hydrogen train as a viable solution. This presentation will cover the considerations for the right technical solutions, safe integration, what may need to happen to make it a reality, and the scope and force of standards for hydrogen for rail.

[@briangriffiths1285]

I am astonished to see such an august body discussing hydrogen as a fuel for rail transport. The guys actually running the trains (in the UK at least) see no future for hydrogen. The simple arithmetic on costs don't stack up. We use electricity to generate the hydrogen. We compress it and then convert it back to electricity and lose 70% of the energy in the process? Compare this to discontinuous OLE or 3rd rail with battery back up and we have the trains built and ready to roll. Hitachi had a successful trial with a train mixing OLE/Diesel and battery and achieved a 55% saving on diesel just using the regenerative breaking alone. As an initial trial it was hailed as a great success. They are refining the design for future applications. GWR are running their Greenford line trial and all the data from that seems to indicate viability of 3/4 rail live only when a train is parked over it for dwell times of no more than 5 minutes for applications on the many branch lines of up to 30 miles down GWRs lines to Cornwall. South Western Rail, encouraged by the GWR trials are looking at the feasibility of discontinuous 3rd rail from Basingstoke to Exeter. With road transport already using 500 kWh batteries for road haulage a 2MWh pack on rail freight seems realistic? And yes you need big batteries to cope with storing the kinetic energy of heavy freight using regenerative braking.