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And those tanks take up a lot of room.

And bring back trolley buses!

Maybe, but you can produce hydrogen using green energy (wind and solar) whenever available, while for a 25kV line you need something more reliable and available 24/7.

No downvote, but the "green energy to production hydrogen" is at best a miniscule part of the problem.

Industrial hydrogen production follows from coal gassification, steam reforming of natural gas, and oxidizing methane. All of these are highly energy intensive and filthy.

This is green washing.

Perhaps there is scope for scaling back those carbon sources, whilst scaling up the use of excess power from sustainable sources.

Who knows what is possible when people put their minds to it and theirs money to be made. Not to mention the possibility of catastrophe around the corner if we all just sit around moaning and harking back to 'the good old days' when cheap children got stuffed up chimneys and orphans kept the navy and the army well supplied with expendable muscle.

"Not to mention the possibility of catastrophe around the corner"

20 kg of hydrogen at 8 bar has its own catastrophic potential and I don't suppose the refuelling facility will deal with just that much at a time.

Clean, industrial scale hydrogen could come from electrolysis from excess wind and solar rather than reforming methane (which is, as you say, a bad thing).

The principle problem for hydrogen is storage and pipelining it to where it's needed; for it leaks through the interstices of just about everything. Also, if there is any sulphur and water present (reasonably likely!) hydrogen will very conveniently turn itself into a virulent corrosive that will eat your system from the inside out.

Powering stuff by hydrogen is fine, which these tests prove. Bulk scale transportation and storage are horrendous problems however and I'm not convinced anyone is really researching them in anger.

I am not sure if storage and transport is really unsolved, the European pipeline network for natural gas is already in place. While hydrogen molecules are smaller than methane the loss shouldn't be too bad.

Don't quote me on the exact figures but something like 5 % hydrogen is already completely fine in natural gas and the current actual amount is more like 2 %. Why not topping it up with otherwise wasted energy from wind mills? Many mills have to be stopped quite often because the electricity is not consumed, why not use the excess energy for electrolysis?

They do, but I think I read somewhere that one of the next stages will be to look at moving these tanks out of the carriage to somewhere under the train.

It'll be interesting to see how it all goes.

"It'll be interesting to see how it all goes."

As in "how it all goes up" if the tanks are under the carriages.

It would be certainly better to install more overhead lines but they are not cost effective on sparsely used branch lines: Those are typically only feasible with diesel trains. While the hydrogen cycle is far from perfect (still mostly sourced from natural gas iirc) fuel-cell powered trains can be theoretically operated more green.

A few hydrogen-powered [1]LINTs are used in northern Germany* and the most noticeable and positive experience using them was the silence. The same type of train with diesel engines is so fucking loud compared to the fuel-cell version.

*) not my part of the country, no idea if they have now more than the couple of test trains

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom_Coradia_LINT

A few hydrogen-powered LINTs are used in northern Germany*

They've also been testing a hydrogen-powered iLINT in the north of the Netherlands, resulting in an intention to order them as replacements for the diesel units currently servicing the lines in Groningen province.

True but electrifying lines has proven so expensive that most have been delayed decades with project costs multiplying and massive disruption to service during the implementation.

Plus overhead lines are notorious for getting damaged

At the least these are a fine interim method

The problem with electrifying most lines is the cost is replacing/reboring low bridges and tunnels on low usage branch lines.

On the other hand Southern Railway & London Underground solved the problem with the third (and fourth) rail.

Yeah, but at "only" 750V the currents involved are HUGE (thousands of amps!).

About 3 weeks ago, Politico-EU did a piece about the French planning to use their nuclear reactors to produce Hydrogen.

Seems to make sense, in that the reactor provides electricity for peak demand, and produces Hydrogen off-peak, so can be run at a steady output.

On-board power (be it diesel or hydrogen) makes the trains independent of overhead lines (or ground rail), as noted by others.

So no cost to electrify the lines and no on-going maintenance of the overhead lines. Also, no visual intrusion. It's worth noting that overhead lines do come down on occasion (due to weather or fault with the catenary), which then puts a delay until the line can be re-opened.

Further, the overhead lines are a distinct health and safety hazard, and while generally safe in operation, doing without them (all other factors being equal) is safer.

but maybe useful where it's not cost effective to have an overhead supply? And it's not as if its hard to find some space on a train for the tanks.

It also makes the trains dual-use, they can run off overhead supply where it exists, and can then continue onto non-electrified (yet) sections of the line.

The hydrogen isn't stored at 8.5 Bar - that would need the entire train to be used as the fuel tank. According to the linked article it's stored at an unmentioned high pressure then reduced to 8.5 Bar to feed the fuel cells.

It's 350Bar I believe, I had the same thought when I read it.

You can choose 700 or 350bar as a standard, and they've gone with 350.

Put enough hydrogen in it and it'll look like a Mag-Lev train (but you'd need a propeller on the back, or a pipe to vent the hydrogen as a reaction engine)!

8.5 bar sounds risky enough in event of an accident.

How is the BED-PAN line unloved, it's had beautiful new rolling stock in the last few years?!

I suspect the writer has not been on any trains in "the north" for quite a while.

The writer was a daily victim of Thameslink's washboard seating until the Chinese virus halted normal commuting. Unloved is a kind way of referring to those things.

The Class 700 EMUs may be "beautiful", but in spite of being based on the Mk3 bodyshell, the earlier class 317 and 319 units were less than comfortable as I recall. Though compared to the monstrosities that were the Pacers, the Deb-Pan stock was positively opulent.

Doh. Thameslink goes OVER the Thames not UNDER at Blackfriars. The writer must have got confused with the mis-named Overground which uses Brunel's Thames Tunnel to go UNDER the river and even UNDER the underground (at Whitechapel).

All clear now?

is there a "Wombling free" line?

Tidy minds want to know...>

The article is not incorrect..."later morphed into Thameslink after the reopening of a disused tunnel under the central London river."

Clearly, the author is referring to the mighty River Fleet here, not the Thames.

ANYTHING is good news, given... brexit :)

Yesterday I saw a man doing rounds around a hill in a jetpack, today hydrogen-powered train, I wonder what tomorrow shall bring, wide availability of covid-testing for UK population?! Flu jab? Boris resigns? My head's spinning :D

Yesterday I saw a man doing rounds around a hill in a jetpack, today hydrogen-powered train, I wonder what tomorrow shall bring

Don't bet on flying cars.

Which tunnel under the river? It goes across at (Is it a station? No it's a bridge!) Blackfriars. The tunnel is North of that and heads the few 100 metres up to Thameslink station.

'In the next 20 years'. Hydrogen has all sorts of problems. About it's only redeeming feature is burning it or consuming in a fuel cell produces only H2O.

It's a small molecule so it leaks much more easily than methane or propane.

It's light so the energy density - Joules/kg - is low, also see next point - storage cylinders are heavy.

It won't liquefy easily so practical storage is just gas at pressure, so energy density - Joules/litre - is low

No distribution infrastructure so that's a large capital cost to get it going.

I saw the BBC report - said it took most of the day to fill it with enough H2 for 100 miles... Admittedly it's still an experiment but it looks very much at the 'alpha' stage. Certainly nowhere near the basis for production.

> No distribution infrastructure so that's a large capital cost to get it going.

If they use electrolysis to provide the hydrogen then they only need to run a power cable along where the tracks go as that is where the trains are. Better still, they could run that power cable overhead to save digging up the track!

And water troughs between the rails to refill the tanks like they used to do with steam trains.

....a concern with the rail transport of used nuclear fuel. In the end they ran a test by running an entire locomotive, at speed, into one of the containers. Are they going to carry out the same test with the hydrogen tanks? Could be quite impressive

That sounds like fun! Of course, even after that full scale crash test CEGB still suffered from endless naysayers regardless of what tests they did.

...what have you just done with the layout of the website header? I don't like change. It unsettles me.

I dunno. That enormous title bar that randomly dropped down huge pictures used to annoy the heck out of me.

I'm liking this new look.

Might be my imagination, but the pages seem to load a lot faster as well.

We've made it slimmer and tidied up the navigation bar. We felt the previous masthead was quite chunky and took up space -- no, not just for ads but also articles.

If you go back through the archives, The Reg has had thick and thin mastheads. We felt it was time for a refresh

C.

Hydrogen powered fuel cells are a bit pie in the sky because hydrogen is tricky stuff to store and distribute. A far more economical way of cleaning diesels is to run them on natural gas. I've seen this everywere except the UK; where I live CNG is used to power buses and trucks that are used in urban environments (such as the trash pickup that's just happened).

Methane is naturally occuring and needs to be processed because its a powerful greenhouse gas.

Looking at the video on the BBC website the hydrogen and fuel cells do take up a whole carriage, but if this were to covert a diesel-electric loco such as a class 88 to run of hydrogen I guess this could all fit inside the locomotive and could then be used for freight as well as passenger routes

Hopefully science can work out to produce hydrogen cleaner and store it more densely to make hydrogen more viable as a replacement fuel.

The inside of the carriage is dominated by Fuel Cells, tanks and a massive battery pack to smooth out spikes in demand. They picked this class of loco, because it had a handy power bus that wasn't a million miles from the voltage kicked out by the fuel cell if I recall correctly.

The target is 2021 for getting that lot under the body where diesel tanks etc reside.

Source: I'm in the same research group, but haven't worked on it.

I'll post it as nobody else seems to have done yet.

Network Rail's recent proposals for Traction Decarbonisation (PDF - link below) proposes only about 1,300 Single Track Kilometeres (STK) of the network would be served by hydrogen fuelled passenger trains, as against 13,000 STK proposed for electrification For the rest of the currently un-electrified network, perhaps 800 STK for battery operation and 300 STK where they can't make their minds up yet.

Energy density means that hydrogen is unlikely to be viable for main-line freight and future shunting locomotives are likely to be plug-in electric and battery.

https://www.networkrail.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Traction-Decarbonisation-Network-Strategy-Interim-Programme-Business-Case.pdf

Not sure where the tunnel referred to is but the trains use a bridge at Blackfriars to cross the Thames. The city part of the route goes through some tunnels so I guess it could be one of the many subterranean London rivers but these are mostly in pipes now.

"It's light so the energy density - Joules/kg - is low, also see next point - storage cylinders are heavy."

wrong. Energy per Kg is 3 times higher than gasoline fuels. The fuel-cells are 3 times more efficient than an iCE engine, so in mass terms it's a very good energy store.

Then the storage issue. LPG is kind of scary, methane tanks no better and petrol has a nasty habit of forming dense explosive vapour clouds. Anyone want to drop their lithium batteries in water?

All energy stores have issues. Some are just more familiar than others

I came here to say the same.

I used to think that the energy density of hydrogen was awful, but it actually has by far the best energy density (in terms of mass that is). To make it practical though, you have to get the density of the material high enough for practicality. Which means liquification, very high pressure and appropriate storage tech to make sure it doesn't all leak through the walls of the tank.

Simplz, generate electricity from Green Energy sources (Wind/Solar/Wave) & use national grid to transmit to plants to

generate H2 by electrolysis.

Store the H2 in the form of Ammonia (NH3), which is a *lot* easier to store & if necessary transport, than H2.

There's existing technology & infastructure to do this.

Crack NH3 to release H2 when required to generate electricity where & when required via H2 Fuel Cells, or even better by NH3 Fuel Cells.

No Carbon in the above cycle, therefore no Carbon capture required.

That's news. Because of course, once you have fusion, spending the near limitless energy on creating hydrogen is a no-brainer.

But without fusion, your hydrogen is mainly created by coal plants, so you gain nothing.

Really people, get going on [1]Thorium .

It's our only hope until fusion gets real.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC_BCz0pzMw