The Electrification discussion

[eldomtom2]

I gather India does so on new and purpose built routes.

All of the youtube footage I have seen furthermore appears to feature flat terrain without any tunnels, overbridges or similar structures.

Doing the same thing on an existing corridor in a densely built area with many such structures might well push up the costs by at least an order of magnitude.

America already has double-stack freight trains running under wires in Philadelphia...

 

[Caesar La Rock]

People are quick to point out catenary installation delays, as what happened with Caltrain. One has to realize the US doesn't really have the experience with installing many miles of catenary like it use too back in the early 20th century.

 

[jis]

People are quick to point out catenary installation delays, as what happened with Caltrain. One has to realize the US doesn't really have the experience with installing many miles of catenary like it use too back in the early 20th century.

Indeed. Experience shows that Catenary installation like many other things fall in the category of activities for which practice makes one more perfect. If one has one project to install a hundred miles of catenary per decade, it will cost much much more than a hundred miles of catenary installed as a part of ongoing continuous catenary installation + renewal project. Again we see in India for example, all the catenary that was installed in the 1960s and 70s are now being rebuilt which keeps the crews busy and in practice, when they are not occupied in installing new catenary.

 

[west point]

IMO CCAT installation falls into the category of very labor intensive at the start. Locating underground utilities. Non reported installations, utility high reluctance to disclose underground lines, lost records, burned records, missed located drawings, But the worse is abandoned lines that may or not be active.

Was one foreman that I had installing a new sewer line. I always walked the line looking for problems. A worker rushed up to me saying there was electric fire at my backhoe operators cab. He could not get out and controls were frozen. It took 6 of us to find problem that a very smart fellow found by looking at a rental house electric meter that was going wild. He pulled meter and backhoe was neutralized.

Found out that electricity was back feeding into an abandoned underground wire bundle. City denied any knowledge of said service. But latest renter did get a big refund but could not find previous renters that had moved due to high electric bills.

Same run backhoe operator hit an unknown gas line. Cannot remember how many water lines found that were live and could not find source.

So, trying to pot hole for cassions every 120 feet takes a lot of intensive labor eating detective work. It can be very slow. If I remember the first electric Amtrak train to BOS had to switch tracks several times due to poles not even being installed yet.

 

[George Harris]

Railway are using taller rail cars now, so that is the technical reason why overhead wires are going to be unwelcome.

The system that use battery pack to run trolley are in city that are quite old and the simple poles and wires are noticeable change to the few blocks of a historic area.

That is a non reason. India uses 25’ high catenary to clear 23’ tall double stacks. It is no big deal. US does not have any loading gauge higher than ~20’. Those are already cleared by standard height NEC catenary.

The only thing with higher CAT is the cross level of the tracks has to be kept with less differences. That way the PAN will not sway on the wire.

AAR Plate H which defines the theoretical maximum vehicle outline for double stacks is 20'-2" high.
The Pennsylvania Railroad design for wire elevation where not otherwise constrained was 22'-0".

Although the container cross section is essentially international, from pictures I have seen the car floor for the Indian container carriers is hinger than those in the US, hence the higher container height in India. I would like to comment here, this is a case were the wide track gauge in India is most beneficial. There are areas in the US where local winds are monitored as container trains must be held out to avoid high wind conditions. In both cases the distance between top of container and wire is right at two feet. Obviously electrically that is sufficient, but I would not want to be within two feet of a 25kV wire.

The issue of vehicle sway under a higher wire can be accommodated by use of a longer pantograph contact bar. Again, an easy solution. Even in straight track, the wire is not kept perfectly centered over the track, nor should it be. If running on tracks with perfect or near perfect cross level, a grove will be worn in the contact bar, and that is NOT a good thing.

Many of the tunnels in the US that were enlarged to clear double stacks were done to just barely dimensions. For many cases this could probably be overcome with minimal or no track lowering using a method done in at least one European country, I think that country being Switzerland. In low clearance tunnels the overhead wire was mounted on an aluminum bar attached to the ceiling of the tunnel much like a top contact third rail is mounted adjacent to subway tracks.

In the 1960's when Southern Railway decided to enlarge clearances on the CNO&TP (Cincinatti to Chattanooga) for three level auto racks and piggybacks, the chosen cross section was 20 feet wide and 30 feet high at the crown. The track was not centered in the 20 feet, but offset so that side clearances were 8 feet on one side and 12 feet on the other. The comment made was that they wanted to do tunnel enlargement once for all time so they provided for anything that might come about. Although not publicly said, I believe potential electrification was one of the eventualities considered,

 

[cirdan]

So one could say India got lucky because of choices made by the likes of Stepehnson and Brunel who were involved in designing rights of way of the early main line construction in India, and then later followed as additions were made.

I never realized Brunel and Stephenson were involved in railroad construction in India.

 

[MARC Rider]

IMO CCAT installation falls into the category of very labor intensive at the start. Locating underground utilities. Non reported installations, utility high reluctance to disclose underground lines, lost records, burned records, missed located drawings, But the worse is abandoned lines that may or not be active.

Was one foreman that I had installing a new sewer line. I always walked the line looking for problems. A worker rushed up to me saying there was electric fire at my backhoe operators cab. He could not get out and controls were frozen. It took 6 of us to find problem that a very smart fellow found by looking at a rental house electric meter that was going wild. He pulled meter and backhoe was neutralized.

Found out that electricity was back feeding into an abandoned underground wire bundle. City denied any knowledge of said service. But latest renter did get a big refund but could not find previous renters that had moved due to high electric bills.

Same run backhoe operator hit an unknown gas line. Cannot remember how many water lines found that were live and could not find source.

So, trying to pot hole for cassions every 120 feet takes a lot of intensive labor eating detective work. It can be very slow. If I remember the first electric Amtrak train to BOS had to switch tracks several times due to poles not even being installed yet.

Perhaps this is less of an issue than described here. I spend several years supervising the drilling of observation wells along the shoulders of various roads and highways. For each well, we marked the spot, called Miss Utility (which didn't cost us anything), and someone came out with some sort of magic meter that could detect the locations of underground pipes, wires, etc. It took less than a half hour at each site, and we never had any problems. I was also amazed at how much of the utilities out on Maryland's Eastern Shore have been put underground. I wish they would come to our neighborhood and do the same thing.

 

[jis]

Perhaps this is less of an issue than described here. I spend several years supervising the drilling of observation wells along the shoulders of various roads and highways. For each well, we marked the spot, called Miss Utility (which didn't cost us anything), and someone came out with some sort of magic meter that could detect the locations of underground pipes, wires, etc. It took less than a half hour at each site, and we never had any problems. I was also amazed at how much of the utilities out on Maryland's Eastern Shore have been put underground. I wish they would come to our neighborhood and do the same thing.

Indeed rail electrification is not the same as trying to lay a new sewage line under a city street.

It is an issue mostly in urban areas. In rural areas it is close to a non issue at least in India. Finding buried boulders may be an issue, not finding unrecorded utility.

BTW in Central Florida, all new construction has utilities underground. Older areas not so much. Most of the power failures after a storm happen in the older areas.

 

[cirdan]

Indeed rail electrification is not the same as trying to lay a new sewage line under a city street.

It is an issue mostly in urban areas. In rural areas it is close to a non issue at least in India. Finding buried boulders may be an issue, not finding unrecorded utility.

It's not just catenary, but railroad construction as a whole.

Speaking from memory here, but i believe there was a derailment of a TGV in France (on the Nord line I think, shortly after it opened) that was attributed to subsidence of the trackbed caused by an undocumented WW1 trench.

So even out in the deep sticks there may be unpleasant unknowns that escape detection until its too late.

I understand these days they do ultrasonic scans of the ground that should pick such things up.

I guess its the Pareto principle. You can catch more snags if you invest more time and money but you can never be 100% sure you have them all.

then of course there are things that happen after construction. the crust of our planet is not rigid but all sorts of things ranging from tectonic movements and earthquakes to erosion and effects of water can change and threaten infrastructure.

 

[jis]

It's not just catenary, but railroad construction as a whole.

Speaking from memory here, but i believe there was a derailment of a TGV in France (on the Nord line I think, shortly after it opened) that was attributed to subsidence of the trackbed caused by an undocumented WW1 trench.

So even out in the deep sticks there may be unpleasant unknowns that escape detection until its too late.

I understand these days they do ultrasonic scans of the ground that should pick such things up.

I guess its the Pareto principle. You can catch more snags if you invest more time and money but you can never be 100% sure you have them all.

then of course there are things that happen after construction. the crust of our planet is not rigid but all sorts of things ranging from tectonic movements and earthquakes to erosion and effects of water can change and threaten infrastructure.

Yes. But that is a different discussion and has little to do specifically with electrification. There are issues of underlying geology and the hydrology of the area around any construction, not just railroad construction either. But that is all well beyond the purported scope of this thread. As far as electrification goes, I stand by my statement. Once the surveys and mitigation for constructing the RoW is done, adding electrification in rural areas is relatively easy. There is no human created infrastructure hiding underneath to be discovered - other than perhaps telecom fiber conduits, which in new installation for RoW and cables, are well documented.

For example, if Brightline decides to electrify, they will face more work installing posts along the old FEC RoW specially where it passes through urban areas, than along the new RoW from Cocoa to OIA. FECR RoW through Brevard County will require more work in the Palm Bay, Melbourne, Rockledge, Cocoa area than between say Turkey Creek and Sebastian River.

 

[George Harris]

Without copying in your statements: JIS, you are absolutely correct concerning underground utilities. As to the well publicized problems with Caltrain, I wonder if they have a "Miss Utility" system out there. I can't imagine them not, but then again, I do not understand why they would be having so many issues if they do. Here, and in my understanding, most of the country, you dial 811, and all the possible owners of anything underground will come out and find where their things really are, because many times where they are is at some variance from where they are supposed to be. But then again this is California. for example, the Santa Clara (have I got the place right?) pipeline leak and fire should not have happened if things were done correctly. Per the NTSB report they had about a 12 inch long section of factory weld that had only about 50% penetration. That should have blown out in testing, if the testing was done correctly.

 

[Metra Electric Rider]

Agree with the statements about how impressive the technology is for detecting underground and buried utilities - they've been putting fiber under the sidewalks for the public school system near me and marked everything pretty thoroughly. I think they bored with an auger - which I've also seen used to reroute the above ground wiring for streetlighting back underground where it belongs (believe it or not, much of Chicago neighborhood street lighting depends upon wires strung from pole to pole - partially due to failed underground iiuc). Of course, our power lines are still in the alley or above the rear property line if no alley (like my place) - the local electric utility didn't even know we had three phase power when we needed power restored after a major localized outage - had no elevator power even though unit power and building lighting was restored.

 

[George Harris]

. . . - the local electric utility didn't even know we had three phase power when we needed power restored after a major localized outage - had no elevator power even though unit power and building lighting was restored.

Ah yes! Another issue with electric power to railroads. Of necessity (notice only one contact wire) the overhead must be single phase. This results in unbalance between phases if carried too far. Therefore, there must be phase breaks at semi-regular intervals in order to balance the power plant output. This will result in the need for a gap in the powered wire. If trains with multiple pantographs are run, this unpowered segment must be at least some defined difference more than the maximum possible space between pantographs on the train, unless there is no electrical interconnection between these points of contact. Notice most high voltage transmission lines have four wires. One for each phase plus a neutral/ground. I am running at the edge of my knowledge of electrical engineering at this point.

 

[JamesWhitcombRiley]

IMO CCAT installation falls into the category of very labor intensive at the start. Locating underground utilities. Non reported installations, utility high reluctance to disclose underground lines, lost records, burned records, missed located drawings, But the worse is abandoned lines that may or not be active.

Was one foreman that I had installing a new sewer line. I always walked the line looking for problems. A worker rushed up to me saying there was electric fire at my backhoe operators cab. He could not get out and controls were frozen. It took 6 of us to find problem that a very smart fellow found by looking at a rental house electric meter that was going wild. He pulled meter and backhoe was neutralized.

Found out that electricity was back feeding into an abandoned underground wire bundle. City denied any knowledge of said service. But latest renter did get a big refund but could not find previous renters that had moved due to high electric bills.

Same run backhoe operator hit an unknown gas line. Cannot remember how many water lines found that were live and could not find source.

So, trying to pot hole for cassions every 120 feet takes a lot of intensive labor eating detective work. It can be very slow. If I remember the first electric Amtrak train to BOS had to switch tracks several times due to poles not even being installed yet.

Perhaps this is less of an issue than described here. I spend several years supervising the drilling of observation wells along the shoulders of various roads and highways. For each well, we marked the spot, called Miss Utility (which didn't cost us anything), and someone came out with some sort of magic meter that could detect the locations of underground pipes, wires, etc. It took less than a half hour at each site, and we never had any problems. I was also amazed at how much of the utilities out on Maryland's Eastern Shore have been put underground. I wish they would come to our neighborhood and do the same thing.

For example, if Brightline decides to electrify, they will face more work installing posts along the old FEC RoW specially where it passes through urban areas, than along the new RoW from Cocoa to OIA. FECR RoW through Brevard County will require more work in the Palm Bay, Melbourne, Rockledge, Cocoa area than between say Turkey Creek and Sebastian River.

Having seen their work on limited occasions, I wouldn't count on 811 for utility locating, and doubt a big project would. Look at what West Point wrote.

In Virginia, Miss Utility uses minimally paid gig workers, or that is my impression. One worker I watched missed a new coax line diverting from an old one in a yard. The campaign to call 811 before digging is still useful, and checks some boxes for everyone involved. But it's not full-on engineering. People with farm tractors seem especially prone to cutting lines in ditches rather than waiting for a marker person to come out. I know two of them!

Virginia, Maryland and D.C. 811 contract to the Miss Utility company. Southern Calif. 811 uses Digalert, Northern Calif. another one.

We haven't discussed railroad business practices and how they like to avoid capital expenses if it costs them tax money. And catenary masts do get damaged in storms. Electrification is worth doing, but maybe not cheap. Brightline does not have enough money to do it, and it wouldn't increase track speed except on 27 of the 40 miles of new corridor, Cocoa to Orlando Airport. Softbank sold Brightline to the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, after all.

Might as well add a fun picture. Self-supporting catenary. Not a glamorous photo, with the venetian blinds in disarray. Ah, but it was glorious engineering! Credit: Yale U.

 

[AmtrakMaineiac]

Ah yes! Another issue with electric power to railroads. Of necessity (notice only one contact wire) the overhead must be single phase. This results in unbalance between phases if carried too far. Therefore, there must be phase breaks at semi-regular intervals in order to balance the power plant output. This will result in the need for a gap in the powered wire. If trains with multiple pantographs are run, this unpowered segment must be at least some defined difference more than the maximum possible space between pantographs on the train, unless there is no electrical interconnection between these points of contact. Notice most high voltage transmission lines have four wires. One for each phase plus a neutral/ground. I am running at the edge of my knowledge of electrical engineering at this point.

Back in the day I attended an IEEE meeting presenting the plan for the Amtrak New Haven to Boston electrification and I recall that being a major issue. Unlike the situation further South where the legacy NH and PRR electrifications were single phase.

Also I wonder how the utilities handle the fact that the load from the railroad is probably highly inductive and therefore power factor becomes an issue. Maybe that is less of an issue with modern AC drives.

 

[cirdan]

Ah yes! Another issue with electric power to railroads. Of necessity (notice only one contact wire) the overhead must be single phase. This results in unbalance between phases if carried too far. Therefore, there must be phase breaks at semi-regular intervals in order to balance the power plant output. This will result in the need for a gap in the powered wire. If trains with multiple pantographs are run, this unpowered segment must be at least some defined difference more than the maximum possible space between pantographs on the train, unless there is no electrical interconnection between these points of contact. Notice most high voltage transmission lines have four wires. One for each phase plus a neutral/ground. I am running at the edge of my knowledge of electrical engineering at this point.

I don't know think the phase the railroad gets is typically the same as the phase on the utility grid.

In many instances there is even a totally different frequency. As far as railroads did not use their own generating plants (in the past), this was achieved through rotary converters in the past, meaning power from all three phases grid-side is combined into a single phase rail side. Rotary converters have the additional advantage that the rotating mass represents a considerable reserve of kinetic energy that can help smooth out sudden peaks in demand-side power draw (the asynchronous machine allows phase slippage). Today of course there are solid state converters that achieve much the same result in a more compact form, with the DC link capacitors taking over the role of energy storage.

Even if the frequency rail side is nominally the same as the frequency grid side, there is still often a case for using a a converter, both for the reasons you state concerning load balancing, but also as tolerances in frequency variation may be different and you don't want the domestic grid frequency to take a hit and slow down every time a heavy train accelerates.

 

[jis]

Back in the day I attended an IEEE meeting presenting the plan for the Amtrak New Haven to Boston electrification and I recall that being a major issue. Unlike the situation further South where the legacy NH and PRR electrifications were single phase.

Also I wonder how the utilities handle the fact that the load from the railroad is probably highly inductive and therefore power factor becomes an issue. Maybe that is less of an issue with modern AC drives.

Why would the load be highly inductive? All that they do is step it down and convert it to DC before any load goes on it. At the other end of the DC link they use inverters to create the frequency, waveform and phase needed for driving the inductive load. None of that should propagate back across the DC link to the grid. This is very different from Grandpa's days when the AC directly fed into induction motors and what not, thus presenting a very dirty inductive load to the grid.

Phase balancing has to be taken into design consideration up front. It is not rocket science. Americans may have been having some difficulty initially as they had little experience in railroad application of single phase electrification fed by commercial three phase grid, until they did the NEC North. The only other single phase 60Hz electrification with commercial power feed was on NJT Matawan to Long Branch.

I don't know think the phase the railroad gets is typically the same as the phase on the utility grid.

In many instances there is even a totally different frequency. As far as railroads did not use their own generating plants (in the past), this was achieved through rotary converters in the past, meaning power from all three phases grid-side is combined into a single phase rail side. Rotary converters have the additional advantage that the rotating mass represents a considerable reserve of kinetic energy that can help smooth out sudden peaks in demand-side power draw. Today of course there are solid state converters that achieve much the same result in a more compact form, with the DC link capacitors taking over the role of energy storage.

Even if the frequency rail side is the same as the frequency grid side, there is still often a case for using a a converter, both for the reasons you state, but also as tolerances in frequency variation may be different and you don't want the domestic grid to take a hit every time a heavy train accelerates.

Most modern single phase commercial frequency electrification get the power through step down transformer from the grid and then phase balance the circuits. The frequency and phase are the ones that come from the grid. There is no "conversion" beyond that. I am mostly talking from what I know of the national electrification project in India. Maybe the richer countries have more money to throw at fancier doodads. But they are not necessary except in very special circumstance, like a system that is small with a single locomotive running around or such. That is the beauty of the commercial grid fed electrification.

Now on the NEC South where there is commercial grid feed to the 25Hz single phase network, the three phase feed is run through solid state rectification and then through a solid state inverter in the new and updated stations. @PRR 60 can give the gory details. There still are a few old rotary converters around too, and of course there is at least one Safe Harbor unit that generates 25Hz from Hydro.

 

[jis]

Softbank sold Brightline to the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, after all.

Softbank sold all of Fortress Group, not just Brightline. Brightline is a rather small piece of what Fortress Group does. But in any case all of that has absolutely zero relevance to the topic of this thread.

 

[MARC Rider]

We haven't discussed railroad business practices and how they like to avoid capital expenses if it costs them tax money. And catenary masts do get damaged in storms. Electrification is worth doing, but maybe not cheap. Brightline does not have enough money to do it, and it wouldn't increase track speed except on 27 of the 40 miles of new corridor, Cocoa to Orlando Airport. Softbank sold Brightline to the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, after all.

As yes, the old struggle between "capex" vs "opex" as mentioned in an earlier post. While it's possible that a railroad financed and operated by private capital might want to avoid unnecessary capital expenses, a government-funded operation might prefer to minimize its operating expenses, as the legislature that funds it would be more amenable to appropriating chunks of money for capital improvements than constantly subsidizing ongoing operations. Also, the main public benefit of rail electrification is not increased speed, but rather eliminating tailpipe emissions from the locomotives. This moves the emissions to a smaller number of electric power plants, which increases the chance that the whole operation can eventually be truly "zero emission."

 

[jis]

Speaking of my point about tipping point in electrification, here is an example of a line that would have never been electrified if everything around it was not already electrified.



This is Attari the border station with Pakistan. This electrification was in progress when this video was done. There are two DMU soon to be EMU service that runs between here and Amritsar each day. That is the only daily traffic. In addition when it starts operating again, there is twice a week service from Delhi to here, and corresponding PR operated service from Lahore to here.

So all in all this electrification serves only a couple of passenger trains a day and perhaps a few freight trains a day. But it allows withdrawing of last remaining DMUs from the Amritsar shed, and allows the Samjhauta Express from Delhi and the freights to run electric all the way to here dispensing the need for maintaining a diesel engine for it.

Pakistan Railway of course sends its diesel to pick up or drop off the freights and operate their part of the Samjahuta Express using their own diesels.

 

[Metra Electric Rider]

And catenary masts do get damaged in storms.

Might as well add a fun picture. Self-supporting catenary. Not a glamorous photo, with the venetian blinds in disarray. Ah, but it was glorious engineering! Credit: Yale U.

View attachment 33663

And CN freight trains too! (damage the masts)

Love the picture, btw.

 

[George Harris]

Speaking of my point about tipping point in electrification, here is an example of a line that would have never been electrified if everything around it was not already electrified.

Princeton to Princton Junction in New Jersey on the NEC. Done long in the past by the PRR. About 3 miles if I recall correctly. Used by EMU's, and probably occasional freight.

 

[George Harris]

Was one foreman that I had installing a new sewer line. I always walked the line looking for problems. A worker rushed up to me saying there was electric fire at my backhoe operators cab. He could not get out and controls were frozen. It took 6 of us to find problem that a very smart fellow found by looking at a rental house electric meter that was going wild. He pulled meter and backhoe was neutralized.

Found out that electricity was back feeding into an abandoned underground wire bundle. City denied any knowledge of said service. But latest renter did get a big refund but could not find previous renters that had moved due to high electric bills.

Same run backhoe operator hit an unknown gas line. Cannot remember how many water lines found that were live and could not find source.

Makes it obvious why the nickname in the industry for this sort of happening is "Backhoe Braille."

 

[Willbridge]

Depends how you define large scale, but in Hamburg for example it is used on both the Hochbahn (metro system) as well as on local DB commuter lines (S-Bahn) and even one or two non DB regional lines that extend some way out of the city.

The original S-Bahn in Berlin also uses third-rail and some locations were pretty accessible. Berlin was built with 800V and Hamburg with 1200V.


In 2014 the Berlin S-Bahn commemorated the 90th anniversary of its first third-rail electrification. A ceremony was held in Nordbahnhof and then this special ran to Bernau. There was still one long stretch of open countryside, and I spotted a couple of photographers set up there for the iconic Brandenburg scene.

 

[JamesWhitcombRiley]

RM (Reece), who I think does a good job on his videos, published a new one. It's about California HSR, but it addresses larger issues in electrification. Notable:

• 13:52 - Amtrak's electrification of the northern NEC in 1990s was "done incredibly cost-effectively."
• 19:24 - Saying electrification is too expensive leads to people who instead want batteries, or worse, hydrogen. Or they at least want to slow down the project to study alternatives to wires. (NIMBY's, or cost-cutters, or just solo blowhards?) To be fair, I should add some context: RM says we shouldn't be afraid to criticize projects we like.