I don't disagree that electrification is the solution, but the article reads like scaremongering to me, and misinterpretation. What's the real risk from NO2 when on a train like this? Is it comparable to the regular scares about eating bacon, for example, which are constantly misinterpreting the facts?
It's all scaremongering. Levels of engine exhaust pollutants other than
CO2 peaked in the 90s and then steadily declined to levels not seen for decades, not indeed in most people's lifetimes. The amount of screaming about them went more or less in inverse proportion, until we reached a point where we should have been rejoicing if anything, but instead we were carrying on like a reenactment of II Ypres. It's an extremely convenient way of raising a political bogeyman to keep people's attention on something which is way down at the bottom of the scale of importance of current political concerns and distract them from bad things which actually matter, and it has the great advantage that it will keep going indefinitely because you can be sure that however much people scream about it, they will scream much louder at any proposal that might actually have a significant effect in reducing current levels even further, so you can keep up an endless supply of citations of trivial instances of highly circumscribed applicability to maintain the distraction. Basically, they are pointing out the enemy to keep you deaf and blind.
The pseudo-scientific media statistics of the form "x thousand people died of air pollution" are a gross misrepresentation of the situation. It does
not mean that you can point to any random individual of those x thousand people and say "Joe here died of air pollution". In fact there are not
any of those "x thousand people" that you could put an actual name to (except Alf who ran diesel engines in his living room for a hobby). Where those numbers come from is making calculations like multiplying the y million people who died of galloping goberitis by the z tiny percentage increase in the chance of developing galloping goberitis as a result of air pollution, and getting x thousand as the answer. That number doesn't actually correspond to any countable quantity in the real world. It's the same for passive smoking or nuclear radiation or any other of the enormous number of trivial exposures with no measurable (let alone noticeable) effect on any individual person that they like to scaremonger about.
Bringing climate change into the discussion as if it somehow supported the concern is not even a bad joke. The two aims of reducing the carbon dioxide emissions from engines and reducing the emissions of the products of non-ideal combustion are antithetical. An engine operating at the point of minimum non-ideal combustion product emissions is not operating at its point of maximum efficiency, so it produces more CO2 for the same output than necessary. Catalytic converters increase pumping losses, play hob with exhaust tuning, and require the engine to run at deliberately rotten efficiency on startup to avoid a long warmup time before they start working. Exhaust scrubbers and filters also increase pumping losses, and add to the dead weight the engine has to haul around. Etc.
Of all the people alive today
far more will die of the effects of climate change than will be fractionally iller than they might have been due to other kinds of exhaust emissions, and in a great many of those cases you
will be able to point to them as individuals and definitely state that Joe here died as a result of climate change. Getting all airigated about the minor components of engine exhaust is a waste of effort and attention.
Electrification addresses both problems at once, by shifting the responsibility for emissions from the railways to the power generators, who could at least in theory be using nuclear or renewable sources, although in this country most of the power comes from gas or other combustion. It may not be ideal, but it is effective. Electrification is worth doing. Making a deliberate effort to create fuss over levels of some minor pollutant that otherwise not one single person would notice is not.