Metra to create battery-powered locomotives

metra.com

10 points·mortenjorck··6 comments

Long haul trains are one of the few scenarios in which I think nuclear powered transit makes sense. They have high mass, are insensitive to additional weight (e.g. reactor shielding) and frequently travel long distances with stopping. Plus, there are relatively few of them and they follow known tracks with low risk of collision.

If anyone else was wondering why battery-powered and not overhead lines, I found some possible explanations on this reddit post[1].

Still, any time rail projects come up, I think about Transmilenio[2] in Colombia. Although it's not without its share of issues, it combines the flexibility and cost of buses with the dedicated infrastructure of trains, and just makes more sense.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/ryjkip/battery_pow... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransMilenio

Overhead lines are expensive and take maintenance. A battery locomotive is cheaper and reduces a bunch of failure modes, like a tree branch downing a wire.

You could combine the 2. Electrify well used lines and use the battery for the last (150) mile(s).

It makes more sense with trolley buses where the urban cores are busier than outlying parts, could work for trains too though to a lesser extent.

I never understood why trains don’t use regenerative breaking like EVs.

(some) Electric trains do (since they can solve the energy storage problem by dumping power back into the grid)

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