INFORMED SOURCES e-Preview July 2021
INFORMED SOURCES e-Preview July 2021
Topics in his month’s Informed Sources range from decarbonisation to the management implications of the Williams-Shapps Plan. And I’m hoping this arrives before subscribers receive their copies of Modern Railways in the post!
Can we afford to demonise the diesel?
Rolling stock cracks crisis update
Williams-Shapps Plan – who will run the railway?
New Train TIN-Watch
As reported in last month’s Moving Wheels (Modern Railways June 2021 p84), Porterbrook Chief Executive Mary Grant has injected a rare, but welcome, dose of reality into the politically-correct consensus over traction decarbonisation. According to Mary, the Government’s aspiration to remove diesel-only trains from the UK network by 2040 is unrealistic ‘because we haven’t started a roll-out of a major programme of electrification’.
As a result the 2040 aspiration is ‘an unrealistic timeline’. ‘Much as I would like to sign up to it we are still going to need some diesel trains on the network beyond 2040’ Mary concluded, arguing that instead of a blanket ban, industry should be tasked with reducing emissions.
Here, of course, diesel technology is not standing still. Which brings us to the issued raised before, – how clean is your hydrogen? Proponents of fuel-cell trains assume that they will all use green hydrogen. But that also assumes large scale production of hydrogen, either from renewable electricity or by Steam Methane Reforming using Carbon Capture.
Achieving that nirvana will require substantial investment in production facilities, none of them cheap. Until then, in the limited cases where fuel-cells can stand in for diesel traction, producing hydrogen will release CO2 at some point in the production process.
My analysis shows that at the current CO2 density of the national grid, using hydrogen produced by electrolysis results in about the same CO2 emissions per unit km as a Class 170. Modelling suggests that a battery hybrid retrofit will reduce fuel consumption, and thus CO2 emissions by around 20%. If this is achieved it offsets the benefit of the falling CO2 density of National Grid electricity to fuel cell traction.
Of course, if you want to save serious amounts of CO2 you have to electrify. And main line electrification is the only way of eliminating the big polluting diesel fleets, However, to judge by the latest statement on East-West Rail electrification, the government’s attitude seems to be shifting from ‘electrification hesitancy’ to outright ‘electrification denial’.
Since hydrogen is not the universal panacea, we need to see how diesel traction can remain running while contributing to decarbonisation and emissions reduction. And railways are not alone.
In 2019, the world’s airlines consumed 365 billion litres of jet fuel. To put that in context, in 2016-17 UK passenger trains used 500 million litres of diesel.
While in Europe the focus on aviation decarbonisation is on hydrogen and hybrid electric aircraft, in America the preference is for Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF).
There are many variations on SAF – mostly biomass based. However, there is also synthetic fuel produced by a technology developed in the 1930s. Currently under construction in Norway is a plant which will produce synthetic hydrocarbon fuels – e-fuels - using renewable energy: there is a lot of wind and hydro-electric power in Norway.
This process combines hydrogen produced by electrolysis with CO2 captured from the air to create syngas. This gas can be used to produce hydrocarbon fuels.
According to the company, its first plant is scheduled to be operational in 2023 with an output of 10 million litres a year.
I’m keeping a cautious watching brief on e-fuel. While Norsk e-Fuel claims the process produces ‘30% more renewable fuel from a given amount of renewable electricity than anyone else’, anything involving hydrogen production or carbon capture has to be regarded with a degree of scepticism when it comes to energy efficiency.
e-fuel is even less energy-efficient than hydrogen. But the requirement for self-powered traction in the UK should be small. Offsetting e-Fuel’s energy profligacy is its simplicity compared with hydrogen. To refuel, you just whistle up a tanker and top up the fuel tank.
Of course, if Norway has a surplus of green electricity, my preferred use would be for it to travel down the new 1.4 GigaWatt electricity interconnector with the UK to help power an electrified rail network. But some viable synthetic diesel to power the ‘last mile’ for bi-mode or tri-mode freight locos might do for now. Watch this space.
Hitachi still seeking solutions to cracking issues
With more details of the jacking point cracks affecting the Hitachi 800 Series trains I can clarify the location of the cracks. I had assumed, wrongly, from the limited information initially available, that the cracks were in the pocket underneath the vehicle body.
When in place, the free end of the lifting bracket on the jack slides into this pocket. This provides positive location and also takes the downward reaction force when the vehicle is lifted.
However, it subsequently emerged that the cracking occurred in the machined block of aluminium which sits on the lifting bracket and transfers the load to the vehicle structure.
So why is what is essentially a block of aluminium welded to a bolster, and which takes only a quarter of the weight of the vehicle when it is being lifted, cracking? And cracking to the extent that there was sufficient concern that it might come adrift in service for trains to have been be grounded?
Hitachi’s Finite Element Analysis of the bolster area, has confirmed that the lifting block was stressed only when the train was being lifted. That it had no effect on the structural integrity of the vehicle itself was a factor in allowing trains to return to service with cracking being monitored.
Early on, Hitachi identified the cause of the cracking as stress corrosion which, according to the Company, depends on the conjunction of three conditions. These are: the material, a manufacturing issue and the environment. Apparently, this ‘triangle’ was present in the case of the lifting block.
Having identified the cause of the lifting point cracking, Hitachi is developing the solution, that said I don’t entirely buy the argument that the lifting pad is not a structural issue.
It is welded to the vehicle structure and is thus subject to forces in the body-shell and around the bolster area. As I explain in the column, these are likely to be complex.
Meanwhile, the yaw damper bracket cracking remains a work in progress. An 800 Series train with a bogie and bolster fitted with strain gauges was running at the end of May.
There have been suggestions that the Yaw Damper Cracking could be linked to track quality being worse than expected. However, bidders for IEP were given track geometry data from the East Coast and Midland main lines from measurement trains running at line speed.
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Breaking News
Chiltern’s Class 68 locomotives were withdrawn in May when cracks were found in the steel brackets supporting the under-frame mounted head end power modules. In old-railway-speak, Electric Train Heating (ETH) supply.
According to Informed Sources, metallurgical inspection showed these to a classic case of metal fatigue in steel. A re-design should do the trick.
In the news section of the July Modern Railways we have exclusive photographs of the solution to the yaw damper arm attachment problems on the CAF Class 195 EMU. As expected, this is a simple metal plate spreading the forces over a greater area of the under-side.
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Williams-Shapps Plan – 0perational responsibility unclear
One comment in the Williams-Shapps Plan caught my eye. The new organisation being created, Great British Railways (GBR), will need to include ‘meaningful numbers of people in middle and senior management roles with substantial experience outside Network Rail, including in some cases from outside the rail and transport industry altogether; and more people with retail and customer relationship experience’.
This suggests that Network Rail is now seen as the dead hand of the railway. That may have been the case in the beginning, when Railtrack got the ‘B’ team when it came to BR managerial talent.
However that was over 25 years ago. Under Chief Executive Andrew Haines Network Rail now has a clear idea of what needs to be done and is getting on with doing it. Defectors from the train operator owning groups, have rallied to Andrew’s banner, attracting further escapees from the increasingly micro-managed train operators.
In my response to the Williams Review consultation, I argued that what matters is ‘structure, not ownership’. And this is echoed in the introduction to the Plan with the explanation ‘What needs to change, in short, is not the ownership of the railways, but their complexity. The sector today is too complicated, too confusing for passengers, too expensive to run and improve, too difficult to lead, and too hard to reform’.
Amen to that. But when it comes to running the railway, that rational approach goes out of the window and doctrinaire Treasury-think on the primacy of the private sector threatens more, rather than less, fragmentation of the operational railway.
When GBR is legislated into life around 2023 Concessions to replace the current operators’ interim National Rail Contracts will then be put out to tender. Sort of.
According to the Plan, the new concessions will make it ‘easier to design the geographic and financial size of contracts to reflect local markets and needs, and to reduce barriers to entry for new and innovative bidders where this is value for money’. So much for reducing complexity.
There’s more: ‘integration could also enable multiple, smaller operators to co-exist efficiently in a way that has not previously been possible’. But, hang on, I thought Williams-Shapps’ starting point was to change not the ownership of the railways, but their complexity which makes the industry ‘too difficult to lead, and too hard to reform’?
Instead, at the Treasury’s insistence, what is being proposed here is the railway equivalent of Chairman Mao’s programme to boost steel production by encouraging every Chinese family to have a blast furnace in the back garden. And we know how well that ended.
Currently, Network Rail has four Regions sub-divided into 13 Routes. This excludes ScotRail because I regard the Plan as the English variant. Over this network run 14 Train Operating Companies, excluding ScotRail, Transport for Wales and the various concessions. If this is already too complex, why the enthusiasm for ‘multiple small operators’.
In the column I discuss in detail some of the implications of new structure, where the GBR Regional Divisions will be managing the Passenger Service Contractors. The contractors’ responsibilities will not go much further than staffing the trains and controlling some costs. Even stations will be managed by GBR.
Thus, in management terms the separation of train and track continues. More on the implications of the Plan in future columns.
New Train TIN-Watch
As previewed last month, Period 1 of the new Reporting year sees the change in the method of measuring rolling stock reliability. Miles Per Technical Incident (MTIN) has been the national yardstick for the last 10 years.
However, MTIN has lately come in for criticism on the grounds that it does not ‘capture or reflect the real impact of fleet related technical failures on the passenger’. To provide a measure that better aligns with industry performance for all fleet technical failures, the Rail Delivery Group’s Fleet Challenge Steering Group has adopted Miles Per 701D (Mp701D) as the new rolling stock measure.
There’s a Table in the column showing the more-extensive list of incidents covered by 701D. Although I have had it carefully explained to me, I still don’t really see how this is an improvement, nor how aligning with the impact on the customer, helps the depot improve reliability. A more considered analysis when I have revisited the interview explaining the change is on my writing list.
Roger’s Blog
Life in the virtual railway world continues. May ended with a seminar on the emissions reductions aspects of the Rail Technical Strategy. Some interesting stuff, but, really, as Scotland is demonstrating; the key to a rail decarbonisations strategy is a rolling programme of electrification.
Next week we have another of Network Rail’s virtual round table sessions with Chief Executive Andrew Haines. I’m looking forward to updates on a number of topics, but hope we don’t get bogged down in hypothetical issues arising from the Williams-Shapps Plan.
While this month’s magazine has extensive coverage of the Plan, both in the news pages and from my fellow columnists, I will be covering it in detail, one issue at a time. Next month’s topic will consider the future for open access operators and how centralised access and timetabling will align with the various Regulatory requirements.
I’m taking part in the IRSE/Siemens online conference ‘Returning to Rail – The Challenge’ event on 28 June, with a recorded presentation setting the scene. I will then be part of the panel for a live Q&A session on 1 July.
While I’ve seen numerous recorded presentations during lockdown, this will be my first experience as a contributor - other than the brief Modern Railways monthly podcasts. Talking of which, for those of you who are fed up with me talking from our conservatory, I hope to have a more exciting location this month.
So now it’s time to prepare my recorded presentation – wish me luck.
Roger
