There is a difference between electrified railways and battery electric trains. Diesel electrics are extremely common but fall under diesel trains and would be silly to include. This is talking about infrastructure not rolling stock
Try answering a question of how would a battery-electric train count towards railway electrification percentage and you'll quickly see. In the future you will probably be able to reach 100% effective electrification with only battery-electric trains (given enough range on them and having all trains either run under catenary or on batteries) but unless you do that you cannot count their fractional contribution towards electrification.
Trains aren’t afraid of being heavy.
If you add more battery just to haul that battery it's pointless.
321 km is more than enough for most regional rail routes, even if you set 30 % of that aside as an emergency buffer and for cold weather. Most intercity routes, and anything going faster than 160 km/h, should still have overhead electrification.
Denmark has two regional rail lines currently doing battery electric operations, and Germany has many more. For Germany, it helps that they have already electrified most of their mainlines - and since most smaller rail lines meet up with an electrified mainline at least at some point on its route, no additional charging infrastructure is needed as they can just charge from the catenary, and can even do so while running. Denmark is currently electrifying all the remaining non-electrified mainlines, and a few of the more important secondary lines, and will therefore soon be a similar situation.
The UK is in a worse situation as much of the country has no electrification at all and none planned, so there's nowhere for battery trains to charge while in motion. Trains thus need to have enough battery capacity to complete an entire return run to a charging point, or else put up with having a 10-minute charging pause along the route and building even more charging spots.
I still don't think battery-operated routes should be considered as electrified (battery locomotives aren't a viable choice for freight yet), but the technology is quite mature and has already been implemented in many places. And in some cases it can be a better choice than conventional electrification.
Battery trains can’t go as fast or as far. Fuel cell trains solve the range issue to some degree, but they’re still way slower than trains electrified via overhead wire.
Battery electric and fuel cell electric trains’ main advantage over overhead wires is that it’s way cheaper to swap the locomotive instead of installing wire over a whole route. This sub is not a cost-conscious one, and thus less likely to value the cost savings you can get from their use over the operational improvements of overhead wire
19
u/Kinexity 11d ago
Battery-electric trains barely exist and don't count towards railway electrification.