Best EV Car – New Electric Car Reviews

2 thoughts on “Can we use big batteries to power our trains?”

1. A couple of takeaways:

   – the weight of a freight car is important, due to bridges.

   – In the US, the typical freight car travels an average of 241 kilometers per day when in operation

   – …a large freight train (four locomotives, 100 freight cars, and about 7,000 tonnes of payload). They found that lithium ferrous phosphate would let each of the four locomotives be serviced by a single freight car configured as a giant battery. The battery would only occupy 40 percent of the volume of a typical boxcar and would be seven tonnes below the weight limit imposed by existing bridges.

   – the train would use only half the energy consumed by an internal combustion engine driving an on-board generator

   – freight trains normally stop several times a day to change crew and refuel, providing an opportunity to boost the range with some fast charging.

   Reply

2. Looks doable to have battery cars which are easily swapped out and charged the night before on low cost electric.

   I would not worry about the economics, simply mandate it and add it to the frt costs.

   Also a hybrid approach that electrified a LOT of US rails while using the batteries on routes that are especially expensive to run the wires.

   Though, for just $18B (three US air craft carriers and planes), we could electrify all the US rails and build out the fast electric (300 mph) passenger service on top of tare a lot of traffic out of the air and onto the ground.

   Reply