mike57
Established Member
The battery charge controller that sits between train supply and the car battery will stop overcharging. The power drawn from the train supply is a function of the maximum charge rate that you allow for each car. To be useful I would suggest you would aim for a 20kW charge rate per vehicle, so if there were 50 cars on the train you would need 1MW. Taking a class 88 that locomotive has a power output of 4MW and can supply 500kW in ETS supply as running now, so supplying 1MW shouldn't be technically impossible if it was designed in from the start. Alternatively you could have a second pantograph and transformer on one of the car carriers. Assuming a 3+ hour journey 20kW charging would be reasonable, I dont see the need for 100kW + charging rates in this caseThat wouldn't work either. The cars at the front of the train would suffer battery damage from being overcharged, and the ones at the rear would only be trickle-charging the whole time. The ETS requirements for 30 cars on charge would be immense, far greater than heating or cooling 8-10 passenger saloons.
None of this rules out charge and travel motorail, what does rule it out in my mind are cost and network capacity. Both those barriers could change with time, I dont think they will, but they could. If they did then technically I see it as fairly straight forwards.