The usual politics and indifference: SNCF is unable to create a ticketing system+frontend clean enough that they can fix and integrate easily to sell cross-country tickets (“Une erreur c’est produite” has been the motto of their user frontend for 20 years already), other technical details are even more preposterous:
ÖBB uses a leased Siemens Vectron locomotive for the Nightjet to Brussels, but that option is not open here – France is pretty much the only standard gauge European country where Vectron is not approved to run.
If this wasn’t Thibault, I would have believed this as another implausible project by some bro who rode the train twice in his life. I wish them good luck but can’t really that much, being in another country , Ro, with even worse train situation :)))
Not really. The speeds of trains is still a major constriction and Indian Railways is a major laggard vis a vis say, China. Sure, some aspects are advancing (electrification for one, 90%+ tracks are electrified) but high speed rail is still in it’s infancy (still under construction with help from Japan).
Beautifully put, Meter Gauge (MG), once a backbone of India’s rail network, now echoes through a handful of heritage lines. While most MG locomotives ran on diesel, a rare few—like the one you’re referencing—stood out as exceptions, possibly Official Login Page steam or early electrics. These survivors aren’t just machines; they’re living fragments of railway history, quietly resisting obsolescence.
Thats a great video. I looked to see if the creator was on Nebula instead of youtube, but it doesn’t appear he is. That’s a shame too, he’d be right at home with the style of his content.
It was named Akbar, after the old Indian Mughal king. I had also taken a frontal closeup image of it where it spelled the name (it is a WP loco in Indian rail terminology) in bold letters.
Sad thing is that I visited the museum 4 years ago and only took 4 odd photographs. Considering the rural location of that place, I ought to have taken more.
Akbar Express runs in Pakistan. A Wiki search shows that that service started in mid 70s. This loco meanwhile resides in India.
The only way this loco could have been used in that service was if it was pre partition India aka pre 1947. But Akbar Express did not run then apparently. So heavily unlikely.
“A-885 ‘Hasang’ — Smallest steam locomotive ever used in Indian sub-continent. Built by W.G. Bagnall Ltd, Castle Engg Works, Stafford, UK, in the year 1897. This 0-4-0 narrow-gauge locomotive spent its working life in the Ledo Coal Mines in Assam”
For curious reasons, they didn’t keep this loco in the main large museum in New Delhi; probably because it is not connected to active rail tracks. I took a couple of hours local train ride to see this in the small museum tucked there.
Do I understand the inquiry is for how to build a line-powered electric, single railcar by retrofitting? In terms of engineering complexity, starting with an EMU and cutting it down to a single railcar would work.
If not that, then a battery electric railcar would work as a base, since it would only need the line power equipment (eg pantograph, trolley pole) added, and disabling/removing the battery pack.
If not that, then a diesel railcar – or DMU and cut it down – and swap the diesel generator for line power equipment. The criteria is that for any self-propelled vehicle – rail or otherwise – having to reconstruct the propulsion mechanism is a big ask.
For that reason, the conversion of an unpowered railcar – like a passenger coach or a freight wagon – is way down the list, as any existing vehicle with propulsion makes for a better starting candidate.
So well before that, we would look to putting other land vehicles onto the rails. A motorcoach bus is a good candidate, but if hauling unpowered wagons is allowed again, a tractor-trailer cab (aka 18-wheeler) could be electrified and then tasked with pulling a consist of trailers converted with passenger seating.
I wish to reiterate that the effort to add a drivetrain to an unpowered vehicle is very high. Some vehicles might not even make this possible: imagine starting with a wellcar. There wouldn’t be any room to put the drive motors near the bogies, without cutting and modifying the frame. And then it would need an operator cab, overhead power equipment, all manner of electric wiring, and so on. And that would still only yield a freight self-propelled railcar. More work would be needed to bring this into passenger service, unless the passengers are fine riding on an open car.
This is really good information, thank you for explaining where the complexity really starts! I especially appreciate the heirachy of practicality. This is exactly what I was asking. So far it seems like there is a much wider range of options than I expected so I’ll think on what best fits the setting.
One other thing I wanted to mention is the complexity of supplying power to overhead lines. This is based off a thought experiment I had long ago, about whether a municipality could “grow into” an electric rail network, by initially underprovisioning the power system until more trains in service demanded that upgrade. My conclusion was that no, it doesn’t quite work like that. These are my observations.
The primary issue is one of raw power. That is, delivering kilowatts over wires that could be very long. We can consider Denver’s commute train operation, which specifies mainline speeds (>79 MPH), 25 kV AC power, and an output power of 620 HP (456 kW).
That 456 kW is the focus, since that’s generally what’s needed at either peak acceleration or at top speed. We should assume that overhead lines should not wreck themselves just because a train is running hard.
If there’s only one train on an overhead line segment, then the power requires is the same as one train’s draw, which is 456 kW here. The problem is that compared to what’s typically provisioned for a home (200 Amp, 240v service; aka 48 kW) or a light commercial business (400 Amp, 120/208Y service, aka 144 kW), this is a massive amount of power.
And even when a power company does supply a neighborhood of homes or a commercial district, they use oil-filled transformers that can be intentionally overloaded by some 30-50% for hours, on the premise that peak electric loads would die down afterwards and the transformer can cool down. Also, not every home or business uses anywhere near full power, so transformers are also undersized accordingly.
But for a single train, the need for that 456 kW is very real, very present, and if the overhead line is even 10 miles, that’s 8 minutes if the train passes through at 79 MPH. If only one train passes per hour, the average power is only 60 kW but I don’t think any transformer rated for 60 kW could survive an overload of 456 kW for 8 minutes and cool down for the next 52 minutes. That oil will have boiled by then.
So in reality, to provision power for just one train per hour, the transformer has to be rated for something closer to 200 kW. An entire suburban subdivision might total up to 200 kW depending on the time of day, and somehow the power company would need to supply this to wherever the railroad’s power conversion equipment is.
So in your story where different communities are working to rebuild tracks and electrify, the latter effort has some gargantuan hurdles. The nature of the electricity network precludes attaching a 200 kW transformer to any random point in the network. A residential neighborhood might be fed with a 7200v 600 Amp ring circuit, which also connects to adjacent neighborhoods. Attaching the transformer to this circuit would work, but it would singlehandedly be 5% of the ring capacity. And the ring has to be nearby the railroad’s power equipment. So stringing new high-voltage power lines toward the railroad is highly likely.
And this plan isn’t even great, because the train passing would cause a lot of issues for the neighborhoods’ electricity voltage stability. There’s also the problem of supplying 7200v (called “low voltage” in the industry) if the overhead lines are meant to be 25 kV. Converting voltage up at the consumer point is generally not a good idea for efficiency, so a realistic rail power system would need to attach to medium voltage (eg 36 kV) or high voltage wires. So now our transformer needs to be located somewhere near such wires, and also will cost more because of the high voltage rating. High voltage wires are only placed where they are by necessity, because they’re awfully dangerous otherwise. Some communities may be miles away from the high voltage lines that eventually power their homes.
In terms of technical requirements, this is rapidly getting out of hand, and I cannot see how a community smaller than say 50k-100k people would have the electricity resources and knowledge to build out an electric rail supply. And it only goes up as this piece of track gets more trains per hour.
If your story does wish to hew towards the almost-insane engineering for electric rail systems, it might be worth examining how Caltrain in the California Bay Area electrified their 50 mile corridor, between Silicon Valley and San Francisco. IIRC, they needed 10 power transforming stations along the route, with special engineering for each one of them.
Overall, this is why rural areas (and even semi-urban) don’t tend to have electrified rail, despite having electricity service for streetlights, homes, and retail. Because they really just can’t do it.
This is really good to know and quite disappointing. I try to keep things grounded and at least close to reality but had no idea of the limitations here. I’ll have to think on this and I might come back with questions if that’s okay.
I suspect the utopian emphasis on green power, hydro, solar, and wind, will further weaken this possibility? I haven’t thought much about what the grid looks like around these fringe communities (further out where the story takes place it’s basically gone and homesteads and villages have to be self sufficient) but these folks could be tied to the grid or striving for self suffiency but that would probably make it even harder to provide this kind of power reliably, even if someone was making tons of the necessary hardware because a train boom is happening.
Does the math change at all if they’re only trying to power a single electric bus converted to rail use? I’d planned on some kind of single vehicle, but I’m not sure what factors lead to such a significant draw.
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