Green Light For Revived West Midlands Passenger Service
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Rail News.
This is the introductory paragraph.
Passenger trains are set to return to the line between Walsall and Wolverhampton, having been withdrawn 12 years ago. Since then, the line has been used for freight.
These points are made about the proposed service.
- Network Rail have agreed the timetable.
- It will be an hourly service between Walsall and Wolverhampton.
- Trains will call at Darlaston and Willenhall, where plans are in place for new stations, as I wrote in Reopening Of Darlaston And Willenhall Train Stations Moves Closer.
- There will also be a second hourly service between Birmingham New Street and Wolverhampton via Tame Bridge, Darlaston and Willenhall.
- Both routes appear to be electrified.
The West Midlands Mayor; Andy Street is quoted as saying he’s pleased with the scheme.
And well might he be!
This to me is a classic reopening scheme.
- There is a fully-electrified freight route, that runs between Walsall and Wolverhampton.
- There used to be three intermediate stations; Darlaston James Bridge, Willenhall Bilston Lane and Portobello.
- The first two intermediate stations closed in 1965 and the last in 1973.
- Network Rail have said, it will be possible to run the extra trains needed.
- The direct Walsall and Wolverhampton service will complete an hourly or better triangular service between Birmingham, Walsall and Wolverhampton.
- This triangular route is also fully-electrified.
- If extra rolling stock is needed, there are quite a few suitable electric multiple units, that are sitting in sidings or will be replaced by new trains in the next couple of years.
Except for the building of the new intermediate stations, nothing would appear to be high cost.
The project must have a high benefit cost ratio.
A Possible Extension From From Walsall To Aldridge
In the Wikipedia entry for Walsall station, this is said.
There are also plans to reopen a terminus single platform at Aldridge for trains to Birmingham New Street via Walsall but not to Sutton Coldfield and Water Orton.
This service would be on part of the freight-only Sutton Park Line between Walsall and Water Orton stations and is regularly used by freight trains avoiding Birmingham New Street station.
This Google Map shows the Sutton Park Line through Aldridge.
Note.
- The Sutton Park Line is double track and not electrified.
- The road running South of the railway is called Station Road, which is a bit of a giveaway.
- There is a xrossover visible in the image,
There would appear to be space for a reopened station. between the railway and Station Road.
- It could have a single platform.
- There could be adequate car parking.
- There would be no need for an expensive bridge.
- The station could be designed to be converted into a two-platform station if a full service were to be run on the Sutton Park Line at a future date.
As the station would be no more than about five miles from Walsall station and its electrification, the extended service from Walsall could be run by a battery-electric train.
Conclusion
I predict, that if this route is reopened and it is a success, other parts of the UK will want to open more freight lines to passenger traffic.
These similar projects have already been widely mentioned.
- The Leamside Line between Ferryhill and Newcastle stations. See Boris Johnson Backs Station Opening Which Could See Metro Link To County Durham.
- The Ivanhoe Line between Burton-on-Trent and Leicester stations. See Reinstatement Of The Ivanhoe Line.
- Newcastle And Ashington. See Northumberland Unveils £3.5m Rail Project To Bring Back Passenger Services.
- The Camp Hill Line In Birmingham. See First Passenger Train In 80 Years Runs On Camp Hill Line.
- The Barrow Hill Line Between Sheffield and Chesterfield. See Reinstatement Of The Barrow Hill Line Between Sheffield And Chesterfield.
- The Fawley Line Between Totton And Fawley. See Reintroduction Of Passenger Rail Services On The Waterside Line.
Most of these reopening, would just need refurbishment and some new stations.
Hydrogen Freight Trains And Anti-Slip Technology For UK Railways Get Share Of £9.4m Funding
The title of this post is the same as that of this article on Professional Engineering, which is published by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers.
This is the introductory summary.
A zero-emissions machine that removes and replaces rails, a hydrogen-based turbine system for freight trains and ‘cryogenic blasting’ to prevent wheel slip could all be coming to UK railways thanks to a new £9.4m fund.
The article is a good summary of the important projects and it also gives details of what a project in the last round of funding achieved.
I seem increasingly to be reposting articles from professional engineering institutions. Does this mean, that we’re all thinking that good engineering, is one of the ways out of this COVID-19 mess?
I also think, that if I look at the list of twenty-five new projects, that I listed in First Of A Kind Funding Awarded For 25 Rail Innovation Projects, that some will benefit the wider UK population in a world dominated by the remains of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Solar Firm To Develop Novel Electronics For Rail Renewables
The title of this post is the same as that of this article on Engineering and Technology.
This is the introductory paragraph.
Solar energy company Riding Sunbeams has won funding to develop power electronics technology that will enable it to feed renewable electricity directly into railway overhead wires.
Because solar panels and lithium-ion batteries work in DC and overhead electrification works in AC, this sentence describes the main objective of the project.
The Daybreak demonstrator will repurpose existing technology already being used on UK rail networks for other purposes to create a new device that will provide the required power conversion.
Existing technology and equipment will be used to save time and costs and because it is already rail-certified.
The rest of the article fleshes out a few details.
The test system will be installed at Quinton Rail Technology Centre at Long Marston.
This is the closing paragraph.
In particular, Riding Sunbeams hopes its technology will be able to play a part in delivering 70MW of direct-wire renewable generation to help power the soon-to-be-electrified Core Valley Lines in South Wales through a mixture of solar, wind and energy storage.
As electrification in the Core Valley Lines will be discontinuous, it could appear that the technology developed in this project could help connect and reduce costs.
Heated Railway Platforms Tested To Avoid Ice Accidents
The title of this post is the same as the first part of the title on this article on Engineering and Technology.
The platforms have been developed by researchers at Sheffield Hallam University and have received a share of the Government funding, I wrote about in First Of A Kind Funding Awarded For 25 Rail Innovation Projects, where it is Project 4.
These paragraphs describe the project.
The concrete slabs come with a built-in heating system that activates in freezing conditions to prevent dangerous icy conditions for passengers.
Rail Safety and Standards Board figures show that 19 people were killed and more than 7,000 were injured in accidents around platform edges on Britain’s railways in a recent five-year period.
It looks like there’s scope for this simple idea to save a few lives.
COVID-19 Reconstruction Projects
If the trial installation or installations, that will be paid for by the Government grant is or are a success, I can see large numbers of the UK’s three thousand or so stations being fitted with these platforms.
This is surely the sort of project, that could be rolled out on lots of sites across the UK to get the constriction industry working again, after COVID-19!
Will Steam Solve The Zero Carbon Freight Locomotive Problem?
Steamology Motion has now been awarded two Department of Transport grants to develop modern steam power for UK railways.
February 2019 – W2W Zero Emissions Power System
In Grants To Support Low-Carbon Technology Demonstrators, I quoted an extract from this article on Railway Gazette to describe their W2W Zero Emissions Power System.
Steamology’s Water 2 Water concept will use compressed hydrogen and oxygen gas in a ‘compact energy-dense steam generator’ to produce high pressure superheated steam to drive a turbine, which will generate electricity to charge the batteries as a ‘range extender’ for a Vivarail Class 230 multiple-unit produced from former London Underground vehicles.
There is not much on the Internet about this project, but I did find this article on the Bournemouth Echo, which is entitled Team Behind Chalres Burnett Steam Car Is Working On Trains.
Note that the typo in the headline is not mine, but one of the worst, I’ve seen in a newspaper, since the heady days of the Liverpool Echo in the 1960s, which gave Fritz Spiegl a second career, with all its spelling mistakes.
In the article, Chief Engineer; Christopher Lack describes the steam power like this.
We take hydrogen and oxygen and we burn them inside the chamber which then creates steam and we use that steam to drive a turbine which then powers the generator.
That all sounds very feasible, despite being a bit like the power system of a Space Shuttle, which carried liquid hydrogen and oxygen in the external tank.
At take-off the Space Shuttle carried 629.3 tonnes of liquid oxygen and 106.3 tonnes of liquid hydrogen. Will hydrogen and oxygen always have a similar 5.92 ratio by weight in any combustion process?
June 2020 – Zero Emission Rail Freight Power
In First Of A Kind Funding Awarded For 25 Rail Innovation Projects, I described this project like this.
Hydrogen-based steam turbine system to provide zero emission power for existing freight locomotives.
This is surely a much bigger challenge, as a Class 66 Locomotive for example, has a power output of nearly 2,500 kW, which might need to be sustained for three or four hours. That could be ten MWh, which explains why battery freight locomotives haven’t been developed.
As hydrogen contains 147 MJ/Kg of energy, does that mean that about 250 Kg of hydrogen and an equivalent amount of oxygen would be needed to power the locomotive for four hours?
The amount of space required for the fuel doesn’t seem to be ridiculously large, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
One of the processes in the chemical industry, that I haven’t modelled is combustion. This is probably because, when I was building mathematical models in the chemical industry, it was for ICI Plastics Division and their processes were all about pressure and/or mixing large amounts of chemicals in huge reaction vessels.
But thinking about it, if you burn hydrogen and oxygen in a combustion chamber, you’ll generate a lot of heat, but not much superheated steam to drive a turbine.
So could Steamology Motion have combined the combustion chamber and the boiler in some way?
Suppose, hydrogen and oxygen are burned in a combustion chamber and controlled amounts of water are injected into the chamber.
- Obviously, not enough to stop the combustion.
- The water would vaporise and surely join the combustion products and come out as turbine-ready superheated steam.
I suspect some researcher somewhere has used this process to see if they can drive a steam turbine from hydrogen and oxygen.
Perhaps, they were experimenting with a hydrogen-based energy storage system.
- An electrolyser powered by surplus renewable energy, would split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which would be stored under pressure.
- To recover the energy, the hydrogen and oxygen would be burned together to create superheated steam to drive a turbine.
The process could work, with an efficient hydrogen and oxygen to superheated steam generator.
But would it be economic, when compared with a hydrogen fuel cell? Fuel cells don’t need to have an oxygen feed and just uses common-or-garden air!
On the other hand, as the US space program has shown, it might work with liquid hydrogen and oxygen, which would possibly need less storage space and could mean a longer range for the locomotive.
Conclusion
It is a very large engineering challenge for Steamology Motion to get their system to work.
But, I do believe, that it’s possible to make the idea work.
I also think that the Government wouldn’t have signed up for a second project, if the first project had been a complete failure.
But, if Steamology Motion can convert a Class 66 locomotive from a polluting, noisy, carbon-spewing dinosaur into an eco-friendly hydrogen-electric locomotive, they will have done the planet an enormous favour, as there are tens of thousands of diesel locomotives, that could be converted.
They will also make billions for themselves!
Air-Powered Energy Storage Knocks Out Coal & Gas — Wait, What?
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on CleanTechnica.
After reading, this must read article, it could have had a title with Knocks Out Coal, Gas and Nuclear.
It makes a passionate article for Highview Power’s long term air-powered energy storage and other systems with a similar energy profile like Form Energy.
It also showed this good graphic from Highview Power, which shows how their system works.
This paragraph gives Highview’s view on what their CRYObatteries will do.
Grid operators are turning to long-duration energy storage to improve power generation economics, balance the grid, and increase reliability. At giga-scale, CRYOBatteries paired with renewables are equivalent in performance to – and could replace – thermal and nuclear baseload power in addition to supporting electricity transmission and distribution systems while providing additional security of supply,” enthuses Highview.
The author then chips in with the attitude of the US Department of Energy.
Don’t just take their word for it. The US Department of Energy is eyeballing long duration energy storage for the sparkling green grid of the future despite all the hot air blowing out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
In an interesting twist, the Energy Department’s interest in long duration storage was initially connected to its interest in at least preserving, if not growing, the nation’s aging fleet of nuclear power plants.
Will renewables be able to see off nuclear in a country with plenty of sun and/or wind like the United States?
Conclusion
With a lot of help from their friends in the long term energy storage business, the answer must be yes!
World First As Liquid-Air Energy Storage Makes Commercial Debut Near Manchester United Ground
The title of this post is the same as that of this article on Recharge.
I can add some extra information starting with this picture from Highview Power, which shows a visualisation of the CRYObattery.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t show any objects, which can give an idea of the size of the plant.
Levelised Cost Of Energy
LCOE or Levelised Cost Of Energy will be a term, that will be increasing used, when electricity generation is discussed. This is Wikipedia’s definition of the term.
The levelized cost of energy (LCOE), or levelized cost of electricity, is a measure of the average net present cost of electricity generation for a generating plant over its lifetime. The LCOE is calculated as the ratio between all the discounted costs over the lifetime of an electricity generating plant divided by a discounted sum of the actual energy amounts delivered. The LCOE is used to compare different methods of electricity generation on a consistent basis. The LCOE “represents the average revenue per unit of electricity generated that would be required to recover the costs of building and operating a generating plant during an assumed financial life and duty cycle.” Inputs to LCOE are chosen by the estimator. They can include cost of capital, “fuel costs, fixed and variable operations and maintenance costs, financing costs, and an assumed utilization rate.
Make sure, when comparing different LCOE values for different methods of energy generation, that the same method was used to calculate LCOE.
Comparative Costs
The article quotes the following costs on an LCOS or Levelised Cost Of Storage basis, which enables comparison to be made according to the same rules.
- A 200 MW/2 GWh CRYObattery will cost £110/MWh
- Pumped storage/hydro will cost £123-150/MWh
- Lithium-ion will cost £231-470/MWh
I have converted some from dollars.
I do think that a 2 GWh CRYObattery could be very good value!
Income
The article says this about how the CRYObattery will earn us keep.
Income will come through grid balancing, ancillary services such as frequency response and voltage support, and arbitrage — buying electricity when wholesale prices are low and selling it when prices are high.
I suspect that if a company like Carlton Highview Power had several large batteries around the country, this would be an advantage to the company.
15 More Fuel Cell Electric Buses For UK Roads
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on H2 View.
This is the introductory paragraph.
A further 15 fuel cell electric buses (FCEBs) are planned for the UK this year, as the country works towards its goal of deploying 4,000 zero emission buses over the next five years.
These futher points are made.
The fuel cells are 85KW heavy-duty FCveloCity®-HD fuel cell modules from Ballard Power Systems.
This will take Wrightbus’s order book for hydrogen-powered buses to fifty. all of which will be delivered this year.
Twenty buses are for London and fifteen are for Aberdeen.
I have some thoughts on the 85KW heavy-duty FCveloCity®-HD Fuel Cell Module.
This pdf file on the Ballard web site is the data sheet and this is selected data.
- The net power is 85 kW
- The fuel cell weighs 256 Kg.
- It needs a coolant sub-system that weighs 44 Kg.
- It needs an air sub-system that weighs 61 Kg.
- It is a true zero-emission product.
It is worth looking at the power train of a New Routemaster bus, which although very different will probably give clues as to the weight that can be carried and the power and battery size needed for a full-size bus.
- The Cummins ISBe diesel engine develops 138 kW and weighs 499 Kg.
- The engine is mounted half-up the back stairs.
- The Microvast Lithium Titanate battery has a capacity of 18 kWh.
- The battery is placed under the front stairs.
- The braking on the New Routemaster bus is regenerative.
These are some of my observations.
- If you sit at the back of a New Routemaster bus, you can hear the engine, when it is running. On most routes in Central London, it certainly isn’t running all the time.
- The battery doesn’t seem very large at 18 kWh.
- The fuel cell with its sub-systems would appear to be lighter than the diesel engine, but of less power.
- The fuel-cell won’t need the generator of the diesel bus.
I very much feel getting all the components into a standard double-decker bus will be a tight squeeze, but none of the individual components are that large or heavy.
Conclusion
I can’t wait to have my first ride in a hydrogen-powered double-decker bus.
Will BALDIES Save The World?
I just had to use this new acronym, I’ve just found on the Internet.
BALDIES are Build-Anywhere-Long-Duration-Intermittent-Energy-Storage.
Atheists Less Likely To Die From Covid-19 Than Believers, Research Finds
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article in The Times.
This is the introductory paragraph.
People without religious faith are less likely to die from Covid-19 than believers, according to the first analysis of its kind from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
This paragraph gives some actual statistics.
For Muslims the figures were 198.9 deaths per 100,000 males and 98.2 deaths per 100,000 females. Among Christians, the death rates were 92.6 for men and 54.6 for women, and among Jewish people 187.9 for men and 94.3 for women.
These are my observations.
The Average Death Rate
The average death rate of these religious groups is 121 per 100,000 people or 1 in 826 people.
The Number Of Coeliacs In The UK Population
This page on the NHS web site says this about the number of coeliacs in the UK population.
Coeliac disease is a condition that affects at least 1 in every 100 people in the UK.
But some experts think this may be underestimated because milder cases may go undiagnosed or be misdiagnosed as other digestive conditions, such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
Reported cases of coeliac disease are around 3 times higher in women than men.
I hadn’t known the last point, but all my coeliac friends and acquaintances, with two exceptions are female! The two male exceptions are both chefs!
Thinking about the last point, I do wonder if women are more likely to have coeliac disease as the disease can affect their natural functions, so they are likely to go to the doctor with a problem, that could be a coeliac symptom, like the inability to conceive.
Diagnosed Coeliacs On A Gluten-Free Diet And Cancer
It has been shown by Joe West at Nottingham University, that diagnosed coeliacs on a gluten-free diet are less likely to get cancer, than the general population.
Does this mean, that this group of people have a strong immune system?
Diagnosed Coeliacs On A Gluten-Free Diet And COVID-19
Various doctors have said, that COVID-19 attacks people with compromised immune systems.
So do diagnosed coeliacs ona gluten-free diet get a measure of protection from COVID-19 from their strong immune systems?
Ashkenazi Jews And COVID-19
My coeliac disease comes from my great-great-great-grandfather, who was from Konigsberg in East Prussia.
In those far-off days at the start of the Nineteenth Century, if you were a Jewish male in East Prussia, you had to leave at eighteen, unless you were from one of the privileged Jewish families.
As my ancestor wasn’t a nenver of a privileged family, he hopped on a boat and ended up in Bexley.
Luckily, I was diagnosed as a coeliac at Addenbrooke’s hospital at the age of 50. My health, which had been poor off-and-on improved immediately and considerably, once I was no longer eating gluten.
But in the Jewish population, there are a lot of undiagnosed coeliacs, who probably have poor immune systems due to their diet.
Are they like targets in a shooting gallery for the evil COVID-19 virus?
Christians And COVID-19
I do wonder about communion rituals.
Especially, as some churches insist that wheat must be used. Even if you’re coeliac.
Surely, your health is more important.
Why Are Women Less Likely To Die Of Covid-19?
If undiagnosed coeliac disease is an explanation, as the disease is three times more common in women could explain it, if all coeliacs are on protective gluten-free diets.
Muslims And COVID-19
Most Muslims come from areas, where coeliac disease is rare and are probably on a gluten-free anyway.
But they do appear to suffer high levels of other diseases like diabetes, that compromise your immune system.
The Anonymous Widower 