I have been hearing more and more about locomotives run on batteries and I believe the UP ordered I think 20 of them. My question is why? Why batteries? Lithium-Ion batteries sure they don't give out carbon emissions but Lithium is difficult to mine and limited quantities of it in the world and there's so many times you can recharge them. I heard the batteries can be recharged by the brakes but still. switchers makes more sense since they don't travel that far and can be recharged at the end of the day.

There's also hydrogen fuel cell can work better than batteries because they don't need to be recharged at least I don't think.

there's a much better solution so solve the carbon emissions problems and that would be electrification of the lines. if I remember correctly if the Milwaukee Road didn't removed the electrified lines during the late 60s and early 70s the Milwaukee Road would've saved much more money on fuel than going with diesels during the energy crises shortsightedness, cost cutting measures cost the railroad millions of dollars. Rail lines with electrification saved railroads money on fuel and safer in cities during the steam age. During the 70s railroads began to look into electrification of their lines because of the energy crises the trains would be cleaner, faster, energy efficient but when oil prices went down well we all know what happened don't we?

I believe and it's a safe bet the railroads don't want to spend the money to invest in electrification it's a long term investment that will save the industry money. In the economic world in the US long term investment isn't attractive.

your thoughts?

Well, there is a lot of disinformation in your post.

You are correct about the "lifetime" problems with Lithium batteries.

Hydrogen (while "plentiful" in nature) is not a "Fuel Source". Almost all of the Hydrogen present in nature is bound up to other atoms (H2O being one of the most common pairs).

Yes, you can "separate" Hydrogen from other elements and then burn it, but the laws of physics (thermodynamics) clearly show that what ever energy you get from burning hydrogen (or using it in a fuel cell) will be less than the energy it took to break the chemical bonds to free up the hydrogen in the first place. A losing proposition.

Many of the electrified railroad lines in the past (and present) where fueled by coal powered electrical generating plants (Cos Cob on the NHRR, etc.). So there is little evidence that electrified railroads (in the USA) produced lower "carbon" emissions. The CO2 was not released by the GG1 (for example) but was surely released at the coal powered electrical generating plant just up the track.

Regarding the economics of electrifying long stretches of railroad track, the Pennsy was only able to complete the Philadelphia / Washington / Harrisburg electrification using US Gubermint Loans during the failed "New Deal" ( RFC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstru ... orporation ).

The New York Central studied running all electric from New York City to Buffalo NY, but it was a pipedream/budget buster.

The purpose of batteries is in conjunction with a 'combustion' source of power -- hybrid diesel, carrier-hydrogen fuel cell, even ammonia -- but with external fuel in addition to regenerative and external 'plug-in'-style charging. Non-diesel power is wildly more expensive and will either require the kind of free infrastructure support typical of hydrogen-battery trains in Europe (e.g. Coradia iLINT) at the greater scale appropriate to zero-carbon freight conversion. The sinking-fund approach that CARB is promoting for 2030-2035 is one example -- I suspect a highly inadequate one, but it's theirs to fix -- of how the zero-carbon rather than zero-net-carbon approach could be realized... in California.

The wise implementation would combine chemical battery and supercapacitor storage, with extremely competent cooling, probably with the kind of massively parallel crossbar architecture in some of the Tesla patents.

The most logical implementation is to use a 'battery locomotive' like a FLXdrive as one unit of a consist of two or three engines, allowing its use in switching or air-quality management districts, with the locomotives connected via the AC transmission's DC-Link (rather than typical road-slug connections) with an updated dual-mode-lite pantograph connection. (Note the operational differences between this and Iden's 'tender' approach)

Electrification is then built out as needed, starting with grades, subsidized areas, etc. In particular, dual-mode-lite rates the electrical operation for the same train factor as appropriate for diesel or 'self' power -- so no reblocking or other overly-expensive shenanigans has to take place with the power -- and in particular there is no need for the electrification (whether with overhead or some application of 'smart third rail') to require lifting of expensive loading-gage restrictions (as for bridges or tight clearances that would not otherwise allow 25kV/50kV overhead)

In addition, expect to see consists used to assist with peak grid generation, and wayside storage implemented for adaptive reuse of high regenerative-braking currents.

Any kind of widespread electrification, even that built out in islanded phases, would require intensive government participation. While I don't think we'll see serious transition to the 'iron ocean' model of national track ownership/maintenance and dispatching after the model of air-traffic control, we could certainly see a sort of carrot-and-stick approach, with hefty new taxes and fines being imposed but with dollar-for-dollar or matching-grant setasides for money actually spent on electrification.

I suspect this topic is bound for 'railfanning' as any preservation content is likely many decades away... but I think some of the intermediate approaches and experimentation would be highly worthy of being preserved, even if whoppingly ineffective. I am still very sad that none of the Republic Locomotive starships were kept.

Does all this wonderful "carbon free" transportation arrive in California before or after the "High Speed Train to Nowhere" ???

Honestly, all you folks doing that "armchair engineering" have a lot of really cool fantasy solutions....

All you have to do is place your orders for unobtainium before all the other dreamers so you have the shortest delivery time of only 5 decades while everybody else has to wait the full 7 decades.

We've hashed this around on the Trains Magazine forums... a far more appropriate place for this discussion than a preservation forum... fairly extensively. The CAHSR and its consultant-ridden boondoggling pork-barrel course is highly unlikely to be operating as any meaningful system of high-speed rail for many years. But the CARB plan is a mandate, with all the force of California government enforcement behind it, with the necessary financial compulsion to make compliance 'less unwilling' -- so it is much more likely that significant action will have been taken by 2035, and any PTC-adoption-like compromises negotiated by then. Much of the enabling technology is already in design (see for example RPS in Fullerton) and adaptation of dual-mode-lite alone is something easily achieved in the necessary timeframe to adapt passenger approaches to freight.

It would seem that preservationist armchair design crayonistos ignorant of modern design and engineering appear to be having some sort of problem with people who are not. Many of the concerns with BEVs -- low cost of production, difficulties with assured maintenance, need for high energy density in onboard storage, and provision of widespread distributed charging at what may be high on-demand charge rates -- don't apply to practical railroading, let alone PSR-addled race-to-the-bottom-OR modern railroading largely influenced by political and legal expediency. I regretfully note that California in particular has made a careful study of the carrots and sticks likely to work on intrastate operations, leveraging off what they've already done to screw up the long-distance trucking mode, and while 'come the revolution' some of this might stop, I see relatively little of the California electorate prepared to help out the modern robber-baron octopi that are UP and BNSF when "saving the planet" is purportedly at stake.

Batteries have improved dramatically over the last ten years. The same power to weight ratio that makes your Tesla feasible also applies to rail travel.

Electrification requires dense traffic, and two trains an hour is not "dense traffic". We are currently receiving battery trainsets for passenger service on lines with traffic about two trains an hour.

Many battery power units were on display at the Innotrans railway exhibition in Berlin last fall, and it is the way of the future, for any line with less than four trains an hour.

https://www.mobility.siemens.com/global/en/portfolio/rail/rolling-stock/commuter-and-regional-trains/alternative-drives.html

One of the things that the Europeans seem to have done swimmingly well is the practical deployment of hydrogen-carrier for transit-level trains. That is, fundamentally, providing the hydrogen fuel cells as 'onboard recharging' of the kind of battery trains Steven described. That goes hand-in-hand with a careful (albeit government-underwritten) development of the hydrogen production and distribution architecture needed to run the trains in general service without the sort of kerfuffles we get here regarding, say, certain Metrolink locomotives with SCR/DEF shutting down at random due basically to incompetent implementation of legislative mandates.

A lot of discussion but the answer is simple.

"Why battery locomotive"

OF course part 1 of the answer is that in certain areas, they have little choice. Clean up or you can't operate. Economics and practicality are taking a back seat for now.

Part 2 of the answer, is that a battery locomotive can be familiar for the most part. I would think they could pretty easily rip the prime mover and gen out of a standard diesel, add in batteries and charging gear, and feed the existing system with DC (600 volt?) and be on the road. Almost transparent to the engineer, many parts identical in the shop. A modern diesel runs off of inverters to drive the traction motors, compressors, air conditioning, I bet it would not take much modification at all to use batteries instead. A bit oversimplified, but really not too bad.

Part 3 is that there is no infrastructure investment (beyond charging stations) no territory restrictions.

Lastly, the basic source of energy is not relevant to this discussion. The RR will buy it from the utility and make it someone else's problem. As a society, we have to decide what we will accept. Coal, oil, gas cause emissions. Nuclear can kill on a somewhat large scale an render large areas of the earth uninhabitable. Wind is kind of ugly and chops up bald eagles and other birds. Solar blankets large areas with panels and doesn't work at night. Hydroelectric disrupts ecosystems.

Bring on the perpetual motion machines.

TAN: An advantage of transferring coal smoke from many locomotive stacks to 1 (or a few) electric generating stations is that it can be easier to control the pollution and fuel consumption since they're no longer under the individual whims of many engineers and firemen. This can be something to mention when describing museum equipment.

The improvement is not as dramatic as claimed.

100 years ago Lead acid batteries where the only practical solution. Then in the 1990's NiCad batteries came about with about a 2x increase in power density.

Then we got to lithium which is about another 2x increase.

So the "modern" battery is about 4x more energy dense than the 100 year old lead acid battery.

Problem is as you move up the periodic table of elements you find that there are no elements above lithium that can be used to make a practical battery.

None of that solves the recharge time problem (imagine 36 hours to recharge a modern "road locomotive", maybe 12 hours with a 1000 amp electrical service). And the fact that you are always lugging around a big heavy battery (much heavier than a diesel fuel tank) whether the battery is charged or dead.

And having to send charged loco's out to relieve dead units on trains....

EVs are a dead end technology but folks keep insisting we will find a "Battery Breakthrough" if only we keep spending enough of other peoples money on it....

And they do not even solve a problem, they create more pollution (lots of power losses through all those electrical distribution setups) and simply deposit it in another place....

Over the last decade folks have spent about 1 Trillion Dollars on "green energy" and the usage of "Fossil Fuels" has dropped from 84% to 83%... At that rate of expenditure we would need to spend $83 Trillion dollars to replace "fossil fuels"....

Not gonna happen, political dictates or not. Once food stops arriving and the electricity only works one day a week it will end.

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But the actual issues are very different.

The prospective battery technology for the 'first electric revolution (ford and Edison starting before WWI) were set to use variants of the Edison nickel-iron battery, not Exide's lead-acid. A key part of that was the prospective lightness of the vehicles, probably even lighter than contemporary 'cyclecars'.

One point with batteries on a locomotive is that energy density per se is nowhere near as critical as it is on a road BEV, even a truck. Likewise the 'packaging' of the battery permits more effective insulation for a chemistry like sodium/sulfur, or even liquid-metal or 'flow' batteries. Integrating proper voltage-to-voltage conversion and 'distributed' supercapacitors gets rid of most of any issues with rapid discharge or handling high regenerative peak currents. Trading additional battery structure for ballast weight makes much of the perceived "disadvantage" of very large batteries unimportant in context.

What is very important here is not to treat the 'battery' the way the Green Goat people did. It needs careful charging between conservative design limits, particularly avoiding the temptation to discharge below about 20% exploiting the voltage-to-voltage to keep usable perceived power high all the way to 'mandatory recharge'. Likewise the design philosophy that produced, say, the New Haven 'jet' EP5s and their propensity to set HCF codes should not be followed in the necessary very capable cooling methods embedded in the battery structure.

Note that recent (since 2018in my experience) improvements in fuel-cell design, notably the reduction of the need for precious metals (platinum and palladium, for example) -- substituting approprately-processed nickel, for example. These cells may not be as efficient as those using noble metals, but the packaging allows much more current generation for sustained onboard charging -- which is how practical fuel-cell rail vehicles are being made.

The biggest elephant in the room with any change over to battery power is just where are you going to find the electric power to replace all the other forms of power that your removing from the movement of goods. Then just how are you going to make sure that the batteries in these units have the range to make it to the next recharge point in all types of weather. Pepsi and Frito Lay are finding out really fast that the Tesla semi is an albatross in the OTR world. From real world usage in their delivery fleets that it is in right now it can not make the standard day trips before running out of power. Why is it having such a problem Tesla forgot to include all the parasitic draws that are in normal daily use you see they forgot to include that the trailers are NOT regenerating power and require air pressure to work their brakes therefore the compressors run way more than they thought they would. They also forgot that current DOT regulations DO NOT ALLOW regenerative braking to be used in normal braking situations and the FMCSA is not allowing them to get the waiver they want to allow it. So they are not getting the range boost they normally get from regen brakes. They only get that when going downhill. Lastly the weight is a huge problem with them. They carry 2 batteries onboard each one weighs in at a staggering 4 tons each. That is 16K pounds just for the battery. These trucks and they are DAYCABS have a tare weight of over 24K pounds and the few sleepers they have are over 26K pounds. Even the heaviest W990 out there weighs less than 22K and that is setup for heavy hauling with all the goodies in it. 200 gallons of diesel is only 1200 pounds of weight a Cummins ISX 15 liter and 18 speed Eaton auto is less than 6 grand combined in weight. A max HP truck and driveline weighs less than 1 of these freaking batteries.

I drive semis off and on (Volvo day cabs for a long time), and I can see some advantages too, like the companies may install charging stations in the yard where we park the trucks, so I won't show up to find that the temp that they sent out in my truck the day before without the code for the fuel card left me with an 1/8th of a tank (or if he did get a code, left the fuel card in his pocket and took it home). I always fueled up when I was taking my break, if the batteries will recharge in half an hour that would be just fine, perhaps there will be more charging stations at truck stops so I won't have to wait in line while ten of those guys traveling together are taking showers while parked at the pumps.