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Edmund's avatar

If you pay attention to any serious rail advocate (no matter how "green" their proclivities) you will see that electric rolling stock is vastly superior, but only catenary fed. Battery-Electric rail is a fairly useless dead end, mainly desired by US planners who have no interest in learning best practices from other places.

No doubt the diesel engine will continue to be very useful in a large number of situations where electrification is impractical, and synfuels are an excellent way forward in this regard (even using solar - look at what Terraform Industries is up to). But mainline rail need not be primarily diesel.

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SmithFS's avatar

Well, they use electric trains a lot in Europe. Most of Russia, including long routes all the way to Siberia use electric trains and an overhead catenary. The only justification for that is the fuel economy of electricity vs diesel fuel. That complex system just could not compete with a battery locomotive with current battery prices and energy density. You would be far better off to use battery locomotives with fast charge stations at train stations. Could be wireless charging also. A battery locomotive may make more sense than a battery light vehicle since the locomotive will optimize the economics of electric charging. I can't see diesel city buses, LRTs or trolley buses competing with battery electric. Of course the way they are pushing up the price of electricity with wind & solar scam energy vs how much they are pushing up the price of diesel fuel leaves considerable uncertainty in the future economics.

In the meantime the series hybrid diesel or methanol locomotive would be the obvious choice. Methanol being much cheaper than diesel, and an optimized methanol engine being much smaller, lighter, more efficient and much cleaner exhaust than a diesel. The methanol engine would run continuously at the most efficient speed charging the batteries which would also store downhill and stopping energy for acceleration and hill climbing.

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