Recent content by InTheEastMids

The railway is clearly "special" when it comes to these things. The investment/"enhancements" plans of other utilities are usually agreed with the regulator and published in advance of the regulatory period beginning. If, for example, National Grid were to fail to publish its investment plans...

Yes, you can use Google Street View to work it out in most cases, because this was done around 2015-ish and most locations have imagery before and after that date Planning Portals can also help you find them as Network Rail do need to show the local planning authority that their proposal is...

I've been reading his work on the energy sector for at least 10 years. There is often, in his work, a technocratic element that some amazing new technology will come along and solve today's problems. (he used to bang on about "next generation solar*"). However, as an economist rather than a...

Although Network Rail did gain prior approval to replace the bridge with a similar structure (as they've done elsewhere for the scheme), I think it is now simply being demolished

All true. However... A lot of early adopter of eHGV is "return to base" ops like supermarket deliveries from regional distribution centres and local authority bin lorries - you're not dependent on 3rd party infrastructure and not pushing the envelope in terms of range or payload. The real...

Government's gone extremely quiet on this - I personally think this will not happen in the UK because - we lack true long-haul road freight of the kind you see on Mainland Europe & North America - it's starting to look like the majority of HGV mileage in UK can be covered by battery electric...

I guess it'd be argued the HSTs weren't life expired 20 years ago. Perhaps MML HSTs should have been replaced by IEP Project trains at the same time as elsewhere? But that would presumably also have been locked into the same contract that I believe some Informed Sources believe to be a pretty...

To address the original question, it's arguably the other way around. I don't know how Network Rail works out electricity costs to its customers, but Network Rail, as a customer, will have a bill for traction electricity cost that includes Climate Change Levy, and various schemes such as the...

Then: Class 81-85 locomotive (IC train) ~2.4 MW Class 304 EMU: 620 kW Now: Class 390 (11-car): 6 MW Class 350: 2 MW So basically each train uses > 2x the power for traction, plus higher frequency timetables

Yes, but they do mean that EMR IC services are not stuffed with passengers that join/leave at Luton, Bedford and Wellingborough for instance, which was definitely the case until 2020. You'd have a Nottingham HST that was standing room only from St Pancras, yet have a bay of 4 to yourself after...

I think what's interesting about this that NWR and National Highways did a joint multi-modal study about Solent-Midlands freight back in 2021. The conclusions are - in my humble opinion - the worst kind of non-commital waffle about working together with stakeholders etc. Agree with this, DP...

The Leicester London Road Bridge has come up previously on this thread before, e.g. way back in 2019, see #3271 below: To which, one of the very knowledgeable commentators on this forum said this in #3272 As I'm not in the rail industry, let alone close to the project, I have no clue whether...

Agree with this speculation, and it presumably hinges on the contract between EMR and Hitachi... Especially if Hitachi are looking at real-world 80x data and thinking they can't meet contractual performance/availability guarantees with 33 trains. In which case, perhaps the customer outcome is...

Yes, I don't think anybody is saying they are unsolvable issues - I certainly wasn't - but they are issues that need to be considered beyond just measuring how many kWh are in the traction battery. Obviously it makes sense to start with a lightweight, slower train on a short branch line spur...

There are practical limits to charging speeds that can be imposed by grid capacity and/or the charger and/or the vehicle, any can be the rate-determining step. Combine that with the dwell time at the station and you get limits on how much energy you can get, with weight/speed of service...