coppercapped
Established Member
From the Dept. of the Environment and Climate Change DUKES statistics, the rail sector uses some 600,000 tonnes of diesel/gas oil per year. Total refinery production is around 64 million tonnes per year and DERV for roads amounts to 24 million tonnes per year. So rail uses 2.5% of diesel consumption on the roads and less than 1% of total oil productionI think the issue will be the transport and storage before it gets to the train. Hydrogen is highly flammable and has one of the lowest ignition energies at 0.02mJ. This means that an almost invisible spark will ignite a mixture of Hydrogen in air (i.e. a leak). Read this for some more background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_safety.
Taken as proportion of total diesel fuel consumption in the UK what proportion do rail based diesel engines use, I suspect it is small so is it really worth setting a whole new infrastructure up to support hydrogen powered trains, I suspect the money would be much used in other ways. Its one thing to have a few 'research' trains quite another to change the whole infrastructure over.
So I agree with you - spend the R&D money somewhere else where it will get more bang for the buck.