Look, I don’t like battery trains, but we can’t seem to hang wires up any more and I like diesels even less
Pan Up
Make no mistake, trains should be electric and they should have big, jock-off power supplies that can cope with anything likely to show up for 100 years. I also don’t accept that just because Network Rail can’t do it, it can’t be done. If a builder was building you an extension and came to tell you he was going to charge four times the quote, take twice as long and only do half the job in the end, would you just pay him anyway? No, you would find someone else and so should we, but that’s not going to happen as long as the present management remains and feels obliged to justify their massive and unforgivable errors.
IPEMU
The research venture into battery trains featured IPEMU (Independently Powered EMU), a very brief trial of an Electrostar working the Harwich branch, which naturally worked. Motors don’t care where their volts come from – wires, cells, generators; it’s all the same to them. The snag with battery trains is the range and life of the battery, and my experience has been that no manufacturer will provide warranty for them for more than five years. Over what was a train life at …
