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[Richard230]

My local newspaper reports that the SF Peninsula commuter service, CalTrain, has placed an order for a battery-powered bi-level electric train car. The cost, including the charging infrastructure is $80 million. I sure hope they get their money's worth out of that vehicle.

[Specter]

Interesting enough, every train today, for the most part, is already electric.  Yes they have big roaring rumbling stinky diesel engines on them, but those are running big generators, to push big motors to pull the train with.

The battery kind of makes sense in a way.  Get rid of the prime mover, and generator and supporting equipment, and use that one car (engine in this case) to hold a battery bank, to power the motors and things the train will need.

Not sure how feasible this would be but.  Imagine if every train car, had a solar roof on it.  Panels that sucked up power while it was sitting there.  hell you could put a small battery bank on each car that took the charge no matter where that one specific car was at,as long as it was getting light, it was charging!  Now hook them together when you hook the train together, and each car kind of comes with it's own little bit of a power pack to add to the overall 'energy circuit' of the train.  Help top off or keep that trains battery bank charged.

We can dream, some of it sounds cool on paper, real world now, well hmm. but this could be doable.

As for getting their money back.ehh.  yah good luck on that one!

It will be interesting to see how this one pans out.

Aaron

[Starpower]

I looks like the payback could be very quick. CalTrain has a weekday ridership of around 63,000 (pre covid) at $8 a ride that is a bit over $500,000.

[Specter]

Well, the logistics on that one look very interesting, and VERY promising!

That's the thing, there are many practical REAL use cases where electric / battery operated makes perfect sense and can save you a ton, be more efficient, etc etc.  There are others where it's not so wonderful afterall.

They could kind of 3rd rail it at the train station, so every time it pulls into a platform, it's getting a fast charge for 5 or 10 minutes, however long it's sitting there swapping passengers.  No not a super lot, but then again, if it's only going say 5 miles to the next stop, it don't need much.  In theory the thing might be able to fully charge for the 'next trip' at each station it stops at.

It'll be interesting to see how this works for them.  I sincerely hope it does.  We have all the ICE holes looking for any excuse they can to crap on electric, it'd be great to get a real life case where, Look, this worked incredibly well, to show back.

Aaron

[Starpower]

I think one of the best examples of EV elegance are the mega monster mountian top minning  dump trucks. They never need to be plugged in - they come down hill with a super heavy load on regen. After dumping they are much lighter and have enough regen charge to make it back to the top to repeat this splender of electric propuision over and over.

[jotjotde]

I think one of the best examples of EV elegance are the mega monster mountian top minning  dump trucks. They never need to be plugged in - they come down hill with a super heavy load on regen. After dumping they are much lighter and have enough regen charge to make it back to the top to repeat this splender of electric propuision over and over.

Working in a business related to mining I cannot say that loaded trucks go downhill often. In most cases it's open pit mining where the loaded trucks have to go uphill and the empty ones donwhill.
I know of a Chilean copper mine which transports the ore from IDK 3000 m down to 1000 m with transport belts. Those belts need braking, that is done with generators, but to my knowledge the balance is not positive, some energy still has to be put in.

[Curt]

Carrying a huge battery around on a train is a terrible idea, just as it's a terrible idea to carry one around on a semi tractor where it takes up 80% of the GVWR limit. It's not even a good idea for BEV cars. PHEV makes so much more sense for most people, with their batteries only 20% as big and still able to go 100% electric for local travel.

A train battery is an enormous extra mass to carry up and down the Peninsula all day long for no reason, plus it has to be charged via huge demand pulses rather than continuously fed power.

Caltrain is being electrified by means of 25 kVA overhead wires, which actually makes some sense (ignoring the glaringly obvious fact that the whole thing should be ripped out and replaced with BART). This so-called $80M is obviously being squandered on special interests, like 15% of a Solyndra. It's no better than throwing money at H2 virtue signaling stations.

The surface area of a train roof receives negligible solar energy vs what the train uses. I could almost fathom these people if they were to include a small regen battery on overhead electrified trains along with solar roofs. But that's hard.

[Richard230]

It seems to me that H2/electric might work out better for a commuter train than all battery power, if CalTrain really wants to go "zero emissions" instead of electric power for a single train in order to make national news and and/or likely spend a government grant before the money expires at the end of the fiscal year. 

[Specter]

H2 electric is even less efficient.  Still need electricity to break that water into the H2,  and H2 is not fun to work with either, but hey if it looks good on paper, that's all that counts right?

Aaron