In the Thomas the Tank Engine series of children’s books, Thomas aspires to be a Really Useful Engine.
Now London Underground has, with the help of a French train manufacturer, discovered a way for trains to become really, really useful, because the Tube has been piloting trains that can power their own station.
The system uses groundbreaking technology to collect waste energy from Tube train brakes and use it to run a large Underground station.
The successful trial, which took place over five weeks this summer, could provide significant savings across London’s power-hungry Tube.
In just one week of operation, the new “inverter” system at the Cloudesley Road substation on the city’s Victoria line, recovered enough power to run a station as large as central London’s Holborn or Oxford Circus for more than two days a week.
London Underground believes that the Alstom-designed technology – known as Hesop – could allow London Underground to tap into a previously inaccessible resource, leading to savings of £6 million (Dh33.7m) a year.
Chris Tong, London Underground’s head of cooling, said: “This state-of-the-art regenerative braking system has the potential to transform how we power stations across the network, unlocking massive power savings and significantly reducing our energy bills.”
A spokeswoman said: “This programme has served as a prototype for how we want to work in the future. We will be installing further inverter systems like this when we introduced the New Tube for London in the mid-2020s.”
A design, by the London design consultancy PriestmanGoode, which designed the first-class cabins for Qatar Airways A380s, has been published but not yet put out to tender.
Mike Brown, managing director of London Underground, said: “The design respects the past but also looks to the future and with the very latest technology, including walk-through carriages and wider doors to enable people to get on and off quickly, as well as providing air cooling for the first time on the deep-level lines.”
The Tube needs to increase rider capacity by 30 per cent as the city grows, and has been putting a range of power-saving initiatives in place.
Greenwich Power Station, close to the Greenwich Meridian, has been refurbished as a low-carbon power generator for the Tube, after six new gas turbines were installed to provide cheaper, cleaner power for the Underground trains. Waste heat from these will also be channelled into a new local heat network, to benefit residents.
But long before new underground trains arrive, London will welcome the opening of another new railway: Crossrail, which runs from Berkshire in the West, right through the heart of the capital to Canary Wharf and on to Essex.
The Crossrail trains, which begin running in May 2017, will be built by Bombardier in its Derby factory in the Midlands.
At more than 200 metres long, each train will include regenerative braking. The trains are lighter than recent trains built for the UK and have smart control of lighting, heating and cooling systems. They will also feature a driver advisory system that helps drivers use the most energy-efficient driving techniques.
Sometimes simple ideas are the best. As Crossrail trains approach the deep central area stations, they will be on a slight uphill gradient which will assist with braking.
They will leave the station on a slight downhill gradient that helps them build up speed and minimise long-term energy use.
Stations are being designed with energy efficiency in mind and the whole system has LED lighting, which will save 38 per cent more power than fluorescent lighting. Crossrail attributes whole-life savings of £19.9m with this one green initiative, when reduced maintenance and carbon dioxide emissions are taken into account.
Reducing energy usage, and carbon emissions, is a global consideration of our times, even when oil prices are falling. Often public transport is considered a “good” or green way to travel, compared with private vehicles, but it still consumes a lot of precious resources. As more and more countries encourage their citizens to switch to public transport, the efficiency of this mode of transport will come under greater scrutiny.
Mike De Silva, who is seconded from the engineering firm Bechtel to be Crossrail’s sustainability manager says: “Whatever, you’re paying for energy it still has a cost. These resources are finite. Even if you get some temporary fluctuations in the price of fuel, the trend is a doubling of fuel prices every decade. And we still need to look at lower carbon technologies and alternatives to fossil fuels to reduce emissions that create global warming.”
Above the ground, the design of tram and bus technology is not fundamentally changing, but transport experts are looking at reducing the weight of the transport systems by using lighter but strong materials and integrating different modes more efficiently, to conserve energy.
Mr De Silva said: “Good timetabling and efficient signalling is also vital. The last thing you want to do is to be stopping trains between stations, as the stop-start consumes a lot of energy.”
Moving block signalling, which will be used on Crossrail, means that more trains can be run a lot closer together.
Other companies that are working on energy saving transport systems include ABB Systems, the Swiss manufacturer, which has installed a regenerative braking system on Philadelphia’s metro, which serves almost four million people.
The ABB system has also been selected for use on Warsaw’s new metro line in Warsaw. There it will recycle the braking energy from metro stations and gravitational energy from passing under the Vistula river.
The German manufacturer Siemens and Canadian transport group Bombardier are also developing trains and metro systems that use less energy for both European markets and for Arabian Gulf transport systems.
Smart cities, where the internet can be used to create solutions to problems such as finding a parking space, will also help to make public transport more efficient. Using apps and technology, passengers can already switch between modes of transport so that they can reduce the time of their journeys.
But perhaps the most significant changes that will occur in the next decade will be those that defy conventional thinking about public transport entirely.
Driverless cars, only a year or two off, could also involve many more people beginning to drive again, according to Mr De Silva – a challenge in itself - if traffic flows better with the new automated systems.
On a more futuristic level, some countries are beginning to look at magnetically levitating systems. A pilot system, with pods that can carry two people, is currently being built on a university campus in Tel Aviv. Called SkyTran, the system has been developed with Nasa technology.
In California, Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla Motors and PayPal, has conceived Hyperloop – a system that shoots pods of people through a tube at the speed of sound. An 8-milometre track is being built in California at present, but the Middle East could be the first location to have a fully working transit system.
Hyperloop Technologies has been discussing building a link between Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The futuristic system, which is likened to the advent of mobile telephony, could reduce the Abu Dhabi to Dubai commute to less than 15 minutes, although passengers would be subject to significant g-force.
It’s probably not the sort of “railway” that Thomas the Tank Engine’s creator ever envisaged.
Gulf nations take to the rails as urban congestion grows
Arabian Gulf states have been relatively slow to join the rail age. However, significant public transit systems are now being developed as congestion in cities grows and the governments feel the pressure to provide more efficient and environmentally-friendly transportation.
European manufacturers and engineering consultants are closely involved in most of these projects, bringing their experience of developing transport systems for dense cities. However, the size and scale of the Gulf projects dwarfs most European cities’ schemes and environmental issues are often very different – for instance cooling, rather than heating, is required.
The French manufacturer Alstom has the turnkey contract for the 176-kilometre Riyadh metro system that is currently under construction, and will be the largest public transport system in the world. Alstom’s US$1 billion share of the $7bn cost will include rolling stock, signalling system and energy recovery system, as well as a maintenance contract lasting 10 years.
Germany’s Siemens is also building metro trains for Riyadh, based on its Inspiro metro platform, which provided Oslo with its system. In Oslo, thanks to the use of natural and recyclable materials, 94.5 per cent of a train can be recycled at the end of its life, which means that what it contributes to greenhouse warming in its entire life cycle can also reduced. Siemens is trying to adapt this system for use in Riyadh.
The metro cars are built with lightweight aluminium and have demand-controlled air conditioning and a weight-optimised chassis to reduce energy consumption.
The trains also have LED lighting and an electrodynamic braking system, which slows the vehicle to a standstill without a huge amount of noise. To make sure that trains are being driven economically, there is also a driver assistance system and the possibility of driverless operation.
Bombardier, a Canadian company with train-making factories in the UK, is providing trains for Riyadh’s orange line.
In Doha, Siemens is building a tram system for Education City which will use Avenio trains when it opens next year. These trains are already in operation in The Hague, Netherlands, and in Munich. In Doha, no overhead wires will be installed because the trains will be powered by a hybrid energy storage system, which combines a traction battery and a supercapacitor. The train will effectively be charged at each stop – there are 25 on the 11.5km track – by an overhead conductor rail. Siemens says the system reduces energy use by 30 per cent.
Of all the rail projects in the region, the most ambitious and critical is probably the 1,200km Etihad Rail.
Because of the distances involved in this vast project, which is initially for freight trains only, the locomotives are provided by Electro-Motive Diesel, a subsidiary of Caterpillar.
There are plans to electrify the network in stage three of the project, according to a spokeswoman for Etihad Rail. But at this point, the lack of electrification means that the regenerative braking techniques and energy recovery systems that are appropriate in urban systems cannot be used.
But European manufacturers and transport operators are keenly awaiting the passenger phase of Etihad Rail.
Even Britain’s troubled Network Rail – which is effectively under ministers’ control again after mismanaging a host of huge rebuilding projects – is involved in the region. It has won a £100 million (Dh562.4m) contract to advise the Saudi Railway Company, which is constructing a 2,750km North-South railway.
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