The UK was once a pioneer of rail technology. Now, it has one of the worst electrification rates in the world and relies heavily on diesel for long-distance trains. Battery-electric trains are a solution to change the game.

This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi speaks with James O’Sullivan, product director at Alstom, one of the world's biggest train companies, about a £1 billion ($1.3 billion) contract for battery-electric trains and how they can decarbonize rail travel.

Akshat Rathi We talk a lot about climate solutions on Zero, but after 200 episodes, we still haven't talked about trains. This episode corrects that historical mistake.

Trains are the most efficient form of ground transportation. With one gallon of diesel, a train can move one tonne of weight 500 miles, while a heavy duty truck would go only a third of that distance on the same amount of fuel. Power that train with green electricity, and you've got an unparalleled form of clean ground transportation. For countries that are building out new train lines, electric trains are now a no-brainer. But a lot of countries, like the UK, built their train networks before the age of electrification. They now need to electrify those routes, and that can be quite expensive and challenging.

This is Zero, I am Akshat Rathi. This week: the electrification of trains. My guest today is James O'Sullivan, product director at Alstom, one of the world's biggest train companies. James has been leading the work on a battery-electric train that will be deployed in the UK. James, welcome to Zero. James O'Sullivan Thank you for having me.

So this is a show where we talk a lot about climate solutions, but so far we've not had a show about trains, having done 200 episodes, I'm very excited. So I have just recently come back from a reporting trip in China, and the Chinese rail network is pretty impressive. Hugely impressive.

Perhaps one of the best rail networks in the world, 160,000 kilometers, 75% of it is electrified. I grew up in India, where again, the rail network is not as advanced, but it's pretty impressive. It goes to very far off places, up into the hills, down to the coast. And now it's almost all electrified. It's even more electrified than the Chinese network.

But for the last 18 years, this is where I call home, the UK. And coming here for the first time, it really felt like going backwards in time with its rail network. The UK doesn't have either the fastest trains or the most advanced trains, or really even enough electric trains. About 40% of the network is electrified. What went wrong with the country that gave birth to the train?

I don't think anything went wrong, so to speak. What I would say is that if we had a blank sheet of paper, we probably wouldn't have ended up where we got to today. You have to remember in the UK, we are living off the legacy of the Victorian infrastructure that was installed at the time.

They used their best expectations, their best efforts to design something that was fit for purpose. And everything that we do now, in the UK specifically, is about optimizing, squeezing the last bit out of the lemon to get the best of our rolling stock when we're introducing them into the UK.

Compared to, say, India and China, which India is not that recent, but more recent than the UK. China is very recent in terms of their installation of the infrastructure. They've had the ability to look at the UK and learn from it, I would say. So what is it that has held the UK back from actually electrifying its rail network?

So I think there was a point in time where, particularly when diesel trains were taking over from steam trains. When diesel came in, it was seen as a revelation because steam was quite inefficient. I mean, they're glorious to go and look at if you've got time at the weekend to just enjoy the spectacle. But in terms of the business case for diesel: you only need one driver; refueling is much easier; you can design a much simpler multiple unit to be able to carry passengers. It was really, really effective.

Now, as we move into the 21st century, and we're a quarter of the way through at this point, a lot of the challenges that we have around decarbonization to treat global warming, they just weren't understood at the time that diesel came in. Some countries, particularly in Europe, decided to go down the electrification route. In the UK, we went down the diesel route more-so. And at the time, that seemed like a sensible decision. But only in hindsight do we realize now that actually, it would have been better to go with the full electrification as much as possible.

And given you think about trains day in and day out, give us why trains are the best ground transport option.

I think it's very difficult to come up with what is the best solution. There is no one size fits all. There'll be certain things where the car has its advantages, certain things where the plane has its advantages. Where rail has its advantage is two areas, I'd say. One, getting into the center of a city and accessing local areas. Particularly if you're commuting into work, you tend to find that rail, particularly in London as well, is the closest way of getting to your office every morning.

The other thing that rail is very good at is high density passenger movement. Even intercity travel, you can get hundreds and hundreds of people on a single train. Whereas if you're traveling by car, you'd be at four, maybe six maximum. I don't know how many people really carpool in reality. I suspect the average number of passengers is somewhere between one and two. So in terms of delivering carbon neutral travel, in terms of delivering people at high throughput from one place to another, rail is probably the best in class for that.

If done right, as China has shown, you can actually make the intercity transport, and even much further distances, much more effective. So I took a train from Shanghai to Beijing. It runs at about 350 kilometers per hour, and is the fastest route between two really far cities. It’s faster than a plane would do — so taking in the time to go to an airport, waiting for security and getting into a plane and then landing outside Beijing and taking transport inside.

Whereas from Shanghai city center to Beijing city center, it’s much faster. Yeah you can go end to end. And the other thing about it is the comfort aspect of it. You're not having to go up 30,000 feet into a pressurized cabin. You can just sit there, you can do work, connect to the internet, read a newspaper, whatever you like to do traveling.

All is possible with rail. So one thing that has always annoyed me is that even though London's commuter train network is pretty good, when you take a slightly long-distance train outside London, if you go to a city 100 kilometers away, you invariably end up on a diesel train, even though there are all these overhead lines that are electric on that same rail line. And I've never understood, at least for the part of the rail line that is electric, why isn't the train using that power line?

Again, going back to the point I was making before about the introduction of diesel, for a long period of time, it was an either or situation. So you have electric trains, you have diesel trains. Some of those trains still running on our network today are 40-plus years old. It's only recently that you've seen the emergence of bi-modes where they have dual capability to run either/or.

So quite often when you're experiencing that in the UK, it's because those diesel trains are a bit older and also go to destinations that have no electrification to them. So a classic example of this would have been the West Coast Main Line and out to Holyhead, because that route isn't electrified. Same with the Midland Main Line now as well. If you go up to Derby or Nottingham, where I've come down from today, those trains were diesel, but they are introducing bi-modes to replace them at the moment.

And the product you're working on now is trying to bridge that divide by adding batteries. So you could have a rail line where it is not fully electrified, but because it's got batteries on board, you could essentially make that full journey electric. Talk us through this new type of train.

So I look after our Adessia product for the UK. It's technically a commuter train in our organization, but we offer it all the way down to metro commuter and up to regional intercity. Most recently we announced we'd won an order worth just over £1 billion for TransPennine. So those will be five car units based on our Adessia product and they will have batteries fitted to them to do approximately, I'd say, 80 kilometers between charges.

It's really interesting, actually, that project, because we have designed the train, but we're also providing infrastructure to support it. So where it comes off the East Coast Main Line, which is fully electrified, it then does this roughly 80 kilometers out to Hull, out to Scarborough on the east coast of the UK. And then using Alstom charging equipment, it will recharge and then come back. And that's effectively how you extend the existing electrification.

There could have been an option there to do full electrification from the East Coast Main Line to those stations. But in the short term, the battery train is definitely quicker. Where the batteries come in is they effectively replace the diesel as energy storage and capable of delivering the power to the traction system. The challenge that we have with those batteries is clearly around the range that we can use. And that's the same if you buy an electric car today, you instinctively know that the range is going to be less than a petrol or diesel car that you buy. But in terms of deployment, the capability is there.

And the other great thing about them is in terms of their recharge, you're not having to go to a fueling station to do that. You can recharge either statically at rapid charging stations or dynamically under the wires as you're traveling. So it's more of an integrated solution with the existing electrification, I would say.

Are there analyses showing that this kind of train could really help lower the cost of electrification that networks like the UK must undergo if they are to hit net zero by 2050?

I think it's not necessarily about lowering the cost of electrification. I think there's two things that these battery trains can be… or two models that these battery trains can be applied in. One is the one that people see, which is we deploy it on a route and it effectively extends the range of the electrification permanently.

And that's really good if you're running fairly long distances but few trains, because clearly the cost of the battery is in the trains, whereas the cost of the electrification is in the distance you have to travel. But the other model, which is interesting because we've got a project over in Irish Rail over in Ireland, which is relevant here, is this idea that batteries are really just a transitionary state.

So if I was to buy a new train today and I didn't have electrification, it would take me quite a while to introduce the electrification, but I have the demand now. So for me, the comparison isn't between battery and electric trains, it's between battery and diesel trains. And so you get that instant decarbonization when you buy a battery train. Over in Ireland with Irish Rail, we have a project out there at the moment where we're delivering battery trains. Alongside that, we have a project where we're delivering a charging station up at a place called Drogheda.

What the government and Irish Rail have already said is that there is funding committed to infill that section with electrification. So it is a transitionary state. The battery trains help you decarbonize today, but long term, the aspiration is to fully electrify. Where the batteries really come in is kind of optimizing existing legacy infrastructure and being able to extend it such that you can run off of it and come back without the need for diesel. That's really where they excel, discontinuous electrification.

And of course, electricity in the UK is becoming cleaner and cleaner, but there is still plenty of gas in the system. So have you run the numbers on how much carbon saving there is in this system?

Not specifically for these units, I would say, but in general, you're talking about an industry that… Again, most of the trains, whilst 40% of the infrastructure isn't electrified, most of the trains will be, by nature of where we position the electrification, they tend to be on the highest density routes. For the trains that are remaining, this is really just leveraging the existing infrastructure, whilst being able to decarbonize with them. So it's not, I can't give you the numbers, but fundamentally you're taking it from what is a significant amount of output across several trains down to effectively zero.

And when they are at the edges, having traveled there, 80 kilometers on batteries, how long does it take to recharge? It varies wildly. I say wildly, that's probably an exaggeration, but it depends on a few things. The main one is actually the temperature. So if it's an average day, you'll find that the train charges very quickly because it's not spending a lot of its energy on things like air conditioning or heating. Whereas we'd have to design the train from anywhere down to minus 25°C all the way up to plus 45°C. So it's quite an extreme temperature range that this is expected to be resilient in.

At the same time as well, it depends on the number of people on board. So if you've got a really full train, you're running those things at high intensity, which can drain the energy some more. So when we get there, it'll be about, I'd say 18 minutes on average, but it could be quicker. It could be slower depending on other factors at play.

And when you are building these trains, you're manufacturing them here in the UK. But where do the batteries come from? The batteries come from all over. We manage a supply chain with several suppliers involved. Really, we work with them to identify the best chemistry for a particular given route. And depending on what the answer to that question is, we use different suppliers, but they can come from all over Europe. There is obviously the carbon benefit you talked about. Is there a cost benefit to the consumer as well?

Yes, there is a cost benefit because in terms of the whole lifecycle costs, and again, it depends on what you compare it with. If you compare it with the existing electric trains, you need to think about the full-system costs. So it's not just about the train itself. It's about the infrastructure that's needed to support it.

If you're comparing it to diesel trains, I would expect the battery trains to be cheaper to maintain, for example. In some cases, it will be beneficial to stick with batteries for the full time. In other cases, you might want to transition to a fully electric at some point in the future because it is the right answer. But it is, I find, on a case by case basis.

Part of the challenge with electrification is the retrofit of the electrification. One, you have to go disrupt a working railway and you don't necessarily know what you're going to find when you get there, so the cost can increase. And the other is that operationally as well, if you want to deliver it without impacting the services that the operator is already running, it's going to cost more for unsociable working hours, for example.

After the break, more of my conversation with James O'Sullivan, product director at Alstom, helping build the new generation of battery-electric trains.

Battery-electric trains themselves are a pretty recent phenomenon compared to the history of trains. There are places in the world — Japan, Austria, Germany — that have had battery-electric trains in some form deployed. What other markets do you think this could work in?

We see it emerging in all markets, over in North America as well, which we haven't touched on. The UK is a really, really big market, though, because it's playing on the legacy of the choice to go with diesel rather than electric all those years ago. So because it doesn't have the same level of infrastructure as say Germany or France when it comes to electrification, the market is certainly bigger when it comes to battery trains in the UK than some other places around the globe.

Is there a world in which we just stop at the battery part and not really worry about the electric line to come over?

Yeah, for sure. Again, I think this whole equation relies on how far you're taking the electrification in terms of distance and how many trains you want to run to meet your capacity needs. If you have a lot of passengers and you're going a short distance, chances are it makes sense to electrify because the cost of electrification will be relatively cheap. The number of trains that you want to buy with batteries would be high, so that cost would go up. So it would make sense to transition to full electrification at some point. But the reverse is true as well. For routes where you're running with a small number of passengers over a long distance, then sticking with the battery trains might be cheaper for the long term.

Say you are to start building a rail network in a country today, and there are many countries in the world that still have to get really started on a proper rail network. What would that rail network look like knowing the technologies we have today and the possible pathways those technologies could take?

That's an interesting question. If you're going to do it from scratch, you'd electrify because you just do it all at once. You'd have the land, you'd put it in at the same time as you're putting down the track, and you'd probably put the most advanced signaling system you could in as well because the first time you do something, it's much, much cheaper than if you have to come back and modify later.

In this Adessia product, the battery is spread out across the five cars. There are some ideas where you could have a battery car separate from the train itself, which may be attached only at the point where you need to go via battery, but be electric the rest of the distance. Are there other types of products from maybe you or your competitor that you've seen that are interesting ideas in trying to electrify trains a bit faster?

Yeah, the locomotive as a concept has been around for years and years and years. So I don't think the idea in terms of attaching something that can do a duty where the standard electric train cannot is a new concept. Is it something that I think is suitable for the long term? Probably not. Because you have to remember these things are assets that need to be used time and time again. If it's only being used for a singular niche purpose, you're not really deriving a lot of value from it. Whereas the battery train that we've got with Adessia, we've maximized the passenger capacity.

If it weren't for the fact that we told you it was a battery train, you probably wouldn't realize as a passenger, because on the inside, it looks exactly the same. So really playing on the existing benefits of rolling stock where we have got large amounts of capacity, not really modifying it for the sake of just having a battery train.

In 2021, at COP26, Alstom announced that hydrogen may play a role in decarbonizing the UK rail network. Last November, Alstom paused its hydrogen train activities in France, saying that the technology is not yet mature. Does hydrogen have any future in trains? I think it does. I think, again, we have to see how it unfolds.

I mean, when it comes to Adessia Stream specifically, we've designed it to be what I call traction agnostic. So again, we're playing on the fact that trains run on electricity. They don't care what fuel source is powering them as long as you can generate the electricity at the right rate for them. So it's true whether that's diesel, whether that's battery, whether it's hydrogen, whether it's, I don't know, nuclear fusion at some point in the future. No, really?

No, that is a joke. That is a joke. But again, the point being is that we're not here to predict the future when it comes to what green technologies will emerge and power our trains. But what we can do as integrators is design space interfaces and engineer them in such a way that when they do emerge and become robust enough to be able to be used in passenger operations day to day, that we're ready for them.

And today, given you're here based in the UK for this particular product, but Alstom has a global reach, where are the places that are growing the fastest, that are exciting, that are doing things that Alstom finds itself in those markets?

I think it's very easy to look abroad, but actually even here in the UK, it's an exciting time now. Again, the contract that we secured with TransPennine, those trains are extremely novel. We focus on the green energy side of things, but they have other things about them that make them really, really important to the routes that they're going to run on in the future.

Sustainability comes in multiple forms. Green energy is one, but also accessibility and passenger experience and comfort. All these things were built into the product to make it a train for the 21st century and evolve what we'd learned from the previous generation of rolling stock.

The other big area that's probably worth touching on is things like digitalization. I've just come back from InnoTrans, which is the biggest rail conference in the world based in Berlin, and there we were showcasing our remote train operations. So the ability to drive a train remotely from a depot whilst the train moves by itself, and you've got all the cameras in place. And yeah, it's impressive stuff. Also the use of AI in trains as well. How are we going to use that to improve and process the data that we receive from trains to give us more insights and diagnostics and prognostics. So there's lots of exciting things happening in trains at the moment, I would say.

When I think about automation in driving, roads and cars are a place where unpredictability is huge and automation is more complicated. I'm not saying there's no unpredictability on rail, but it is much lower than it would be on roads. And of course, the cases where automatic trains have existed have existed for quite some time. The DLR line here in London does not have a driver. But the use case of automation hasn't been as wide as I thought it could be, given it is more simple to automate rail. Why has that not happened?

So when you're looking at automated uses in rail, particularly, we have this thing called grade of automation (GOA). And it goes from one to four, depending on how unattended or independent the train is running. Your traditional train would run at GOA1, which basically means there's a driver there. GOA2 is that there's a driver there, but the train controls the traction side of things and the braking. GOA3, which is the DLR, is quite a unique case where there isn't a driver on board, but there is an attendant to manage the doors. And then GOA4 is the complete unattended operation.

And what you tend to find with GOA3 and 4 is they are on very closed networks. So they work well in metros. But on the mainline, it's not made that leap yet because of all the different things that interact with mainline trains — level crossings, people accessing the track. The question has always been, how do we make them safe for that environment? But that is really the next step when it comes to the digital aspect of these trains. Using onboard sensors like cameras and signaling equipment, like the move to ETCS (European Train Control System), will start to move through those grades of automation steps on the main line as well.

And one aspect of digitalization, I'm assuming that has played out, is on the safety side. Just like it has in the air infrastructure, there are fewer and fewer accidents that happen. Not to say train accidents don't happen, here in the UK, we had a big one this year. But how much does digitalization speed up safety?

I think it's actually a challenge there because digitalization is moving at an extremely fast pace and our ability to maintain safe systems requires that you take a slower approach, and a more methodical approach. If I look at the way that we approach safety systems, it's all about reducing the probability of something happening to effectively zero. It's so low that it shouldn't happen in the lifetime of a fleet of trains operating consistently, for some of the catastrophic events.

The digital aspect of it then is how do we… For example, software controlled trains, how do we ensure that those are delivering functions time and time again in the same way, in a repeatable, reliable way to ensure that it's safe? If you think about the way that AI writes software and writes code, it doesn't tend to be repeatable, so those two things are divorced from one another. So it's not something that we shun or avoid as an industry, but it certainly is a challenge.

So you talked about the fact that this might be an exciting time for the UK rail network. Now, the regeneration of UK rail has been a project that's come up again and again. There have been a few false dawns. The most recent one now is about nationalizing the network, which the government has been doing for the past few years. Are you worried that this might be another false dawn? And if not, what gives you confidence that this time around, this regeneration, this recreation of the network, electrifying it, making it clean, actually continues at pace?

I can't speak for the wider industry, but from a personal and Alstom perspective, I think this project here gives us an opportunity to showcase the capability, not just of the industry or our products, but actually the engineers that are involved in them, the capability of the people to really emphasize that when given the opportunity to deliver for the UK rail market, actually we can take that and really show some novel products, bring benefits to passengers, make the technology greener, improve sustainability.

Because we have the capability, I think for a period of time, it has been hidden away. And if you read the press, most people reading the press would think that any time I see rail in the news, it's for bad reasons. Ticket prices going up, incidents happening, as you mentioned before. Projects not running on time, being very expensive.

So really, we want to reverse that trend with this project and say, look, we have put the effort in, we've prepared upfront. We know what we're doing with this. Let's demonstrate it to you. And that's why it's an exciting time, really. It's an opportunity to rewrite the history book. Thank you, James. Thank you.

And thank you for listening to Zero. Now for the sound of the week. That is the sound of an early steam train. A sound that's been largely confined to history as trains have transitioned from steam to electricity.

If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Spotify. This episode was produced by Oscar Boyd. Special thanks to Olivia Rudgard, Sommer Saadi, and Alyssa McDonald. I'm Akshat Rathi, back soon.