Vivarail overseas?
Vivarail is producing just five electric trains for the Isle of Wight and five diesel/battery hybrid trains for Wales. But the company says it has more sales lined up - not all of them in the UK.
With its first hybrid trains heading out to Wales and other D-Trains to the Isle of Wight, Vivarail is looking to overseas markets.
“We are now producing a family of battery trains,” says Vivarail Chairman and Chief Executive Adrian Shooter during a walk around the company’s workshop.
“We will not be making any more trains with diesel engines.”
Vivarail’s facility at Long Marston is slightly ramshackle. It’s an assortment of Portakabins and recycled buildings alongside a handful of old sidings, across the road from a long-disused military airfield and the stub of an equally disused railway line to Stratford-upon-Avon.
It doesn’t exactly ooze hi-tech charisma as a simmering pot of cutting-edge innovation. But that is precisely what it aims to be.
To date, the company has publicly announced precisely three orders - five threecar diesel/hybrid trains for Wales, five two-car third-rail electric trains for the Isle of Wight, and three two-car diesel units for the Marston Vale Line.
Outside its factory stand 200 40-year-old ex-London Underground District Line vehicles, hoping for a new future while decaying gently in the meantime. Vivarail reckons the aluminium bodyshells are in excellent condition and good for another 30 years. The pile of stored trains is so extensive that it shows up clearly on Google satellite images.
There are more deals to come. And bigger deals, according to the chairman, chief executive and 25% shareholder. Shooter won’t disclose the details, but hints that a large proportion of those idle LU vehicles will be transformed before heading to an overseas buyer, under battery power.
“There will be no more diesels after the diesel/battery hybrids for Wales that we are building at the moment,” he reveals.
“To be honest, if we were bidding for them now, or at any time in the last year, we would have bid them as total battery trains. But three years ago, we were not ready for that.
“All of them, so far, have been tested on the main line. And all have done more than 40 miles several times, just on batteries.
“The batteries are charged by diesel engines, however. And they recover energy when braking, which means using a lot less fuel.”
The Welsh order is substantially complete. The first set is away on test in Birkenhead. Another is at the point where wiring looms are being buried beneath shiny new panels, and seats are being fitted.
Three of the Island Line trains will be delivered this side of Christmas (a few Coronavirus-affected months behind the original schedule), with the remaining two crossing the Solent by the end of March.
Shooter tells RAIL: “In the family of trains, there is a battery driving motor car at each end. In the middle you could put a car with a pantograph and a transformer that runs on the 25kV, so that when it is under the wires, it charges. Beyond the wires, it can carry on with batteries alone.
“We reckon there are about 70 routes in the UK where such a train could perform. And our trains would be suitable for at least half of those.
“That train with a pantograph will be ready to demonstrate in the spring of next year.
There are a number of routes we will run it on, to demonstrate its utility.
“One where it would be very suitable is the Ashington Blyth and Tyne Line, which will be opened a little after that. Four and a half miles out of Newcastle under the wire, then 15 miles without it. Then reverse. And the train will easily do that.”
Vivarail has been contemplating a hydrogen variant. A company called Steamology, in the New Forest, received Government funding to work on the technology for a system that could be bolted on, in place of a battery or diesel motor.
“We may build a hydrogen fuel cell version,” says Shooter.
“We have done all the design in principle, and quite a lot of the detail. You would have the same battery driving motor cars at each end. The middle car or cars - probably two of them - would have hydrogen cylinders and the cell under the floor.
“On those trains, it is important to note that you can’t just couple the fuel cell to the motor, as others have done. You actually need to have a battery so that the battery can absorb the really quite violent driving that you get on a train. One minute it is on full power.
Next minute it is off. The fuel cell can’t handle that at all. So the cell sits there purring away, keeping the battery charged up.
“Fuel cells have advantages - such a train could run quite long distances. But what you don’t see quoted much is the fuel cost. It is very much higher - three and a half times as much as a battery - because to produce the hydrogen you have to electrolyse it. You can’t use dirty hydrogen, which is a by-product from chemical factories. The inefficiencies in the system simply make the fuel very expensive.
“To give you a measure of that, when I used to run Chiltern Railways, our profit in a good year was not dissimilar to our fuel cost. So, if your fuel cost will be three and a half times as much, you can see what that does to the
I would be surprised if you don’t travel on a battery train as a fare-paying passenger in this country in 2022. I’m not saying there will be a lot of them, but there will be at least one.
Adrian Shooter, Chairman and Chief Executive, Vivarail
economics of the railway.”
How active is the hydrogen project?
“We are not spending at a great rate on it, but there are one or two applications that people are keen on doing, despite the additional cost. I suspect we will have one, if only because there is so much enthusiasm for it.
“Do I think we will have very many hydrogen trains? No. I don’t think we will. The economics are not there.”
Fast charging is an aspect that Vivarail has been exploring in some detail. Shooter explains: “You can get 100 miles off a battery under the floor. The batteries have 100kW/ hours of energy. They weigh 1.7 tonnes, including an integral cooling system. You need that if you’re going to charge at a high rate.
“With the new batteries we have developed with a German company, Hoppecke, they can be charged up from nearly flat to full in ten minutes. Which is a bit of a game changer.”
Game changer? No car charger at a motorway services comes close, and the automotive sector has led the way so far, investing tens of billions of pounds each year. It has a volume and level of commercial demand that rail can never match.
But Shooter adds: “We have such a thing.
We have designed and patented it. It’s called Fast Charge. It is going through the Network Rail approval process to be fitted as a standard piece of kit. This autumn it should be fully approved.
“If you imagine a scenario where a train is shuttling backwards and forwards, maybe on a ten-mile branch line with a charger at one end, you’re actually only going to be charging it for a couple of minutes.
“If you’re talking about long-distance trains, you can install a charger that can replenish the batteries in a few minutes. We are at the moment putting together a bid for an
operator - not in this country - where the routes would be up to 500 miles long, to be provided totally with battery trains using this device.
“The driver has to do nothing, other than stop in the correct place. It is fully automatic. It goes through various safety checks to make sure no one has shorted the conductor rails, which are positioned under the train so that when they are live, no one can get electrocuted. They are dead if the train is not there.
“We charge at a very high rate of over 1,000 amps per shoe. That is about three times the maximum you would put through a cast iron shoe on a third-rail train.
“This bid we are putting together contemplates trains that are running for several hours - 60 or 70 miles between charging stations, but with the possibility of going twice that far in emergency if the charging station should go down.
“Essentially, what we are doing is coupling to a big static battery which dumps a big charge very quickly. Depending where you are in the world, you could use various means to charge the static battery where this fast charging device sits.
“Typically, you would charge overnight, connected to the local supply. There are cheaper tariffs at night. If you’re in a very sunny place - like where we are putting this bid together - you could equally charge it from a solar farm. Quite a large one, admittedly.” Where is this sunny place?
“Abroad.”
Where, exactly?
“Abroad is a very big place.”
Shooter will not be drawn further, but he adds: “The family can charge off the Fast Charge, off the 25kV, or off fuel cells. Also, we are working on re-equipping other trains, besides our District Line stock.”
That could potentially include South Western Railway’s Class 455 commuter trains, which are being replaced by new Bombardier Aventras over the next two years. SWR Interim Managing Director Mark Hopwood has previously mentioned the idea, although Shooter will neither confirm nor deny it.
“We have a quote in for re-powering some half-life EMUs. Not in this country. So they would be battery trains. We are also talking to one or two people in this country about half-life EMUs. And finally, a product we will launch before long is to re-power a DMU.
“Almost all the DMUs in this country have a diesel engine which drives a Voith gearbox, which is very reliable but not tremendously efficient. We would replace that with a large electric motor, driving the same thing the gearbox is driving. We have done simulations and plans for a number of locations. That is a product we will launch in some detail next year.”
All this is a long way from the company’s current small order book for Wales and the
Isle of Wight. To be blunt, Vivrail to date has a handful of hybrid trains and a handful that are simply updated bog-standard third-rail traction.
“We have some other orders which I am not permitted to tell you about yet,” Shooter says mysteriously.
“And we have a long list of potential orders. We are talking to various customers. Some customers are quite precious about what they want the market to know.”
But you have plenty of work for your 240 staff?
“Oh yes.”
In the meantime, after five years alongside the storage sidings, Vivarail is getting ready to move. And it’s moving to a place with no railway.
Shooter explains: “You’ve seen our location at Long Marston. It has served us very well, but it is disjointed. We are sitting in a Portakabin. Our workshop is OK, but not wonderful. Our stores are two miles away.
“So we are moving to a place 20 miles from here at Southam, north of Banbury, where we will be under one roof - offices, stores, everything else.
“It does have a disadvantage - it is not railconnected. So we have done a deal with the people who run the 2½-mile Barry Railway in South Wales, connected to the main line. And we will be doing testing and commissioning of trains down there.”
Where is viable right now for battery trains? “I think quite possibly the first you will see is Ashington Blyth Tyne,” says Shooter.
“We are talking to people about other places. One I can’t tell you about will happen quite quickly.
“I would be surprised if you don’t travel on a battery train as a fare-paying passenger in this country in 2022. I’m not saying there will be a lot of them, but there will be at least one.
“The Government has started to realise that if it is making commitments about decarbonising the rail network, it needs to start doing some small things now.”
Everyone wants to know how long the batteries are going to last. That anxiety is one of the main factors that put car buyers off choosing pure electric plug-in vehicles. And it affects second-hand prices - used electric cars are cheap, because the early models suffered a steep decline in battery performance over four years.
Shooter responds: “Our batteries will be warranted for seven years by the manufacturer, Hoppecke. All ranges I have quoted are at the end of seven-year ranges, so you can assume
However much of the UK will be electrified, everything left over has to be addressed by hydrogen or battery power, so the amount of future electrification is a very interesting number. I would say the technology is moving very quickly.
Adrian Shooter, Chairman and Chief Executive, Vivarail
the trains would go rather further when they are new.
“Every individual cell is monitored continuously for current and temperature. A computer in the battery module reports to the computer that controls the train. The latter uses that information when it takes the charging current in. The computer in the battery is also in continuous communication with Hoppecke.
“You don’t want to charge to 100%, because then you won’t have space to accommodate energy stored during braking, so you won’t charge over about 90%. Nor will you take it right down to zero, because that will reduce the life of the battery. These things have all been studied quite carefully.
“The warranty will have conditions applied, including not normally taking the battery below about 20%, so everything is very highly controlled, measured and managed.”
Vivrail boasts a modular design. As technologies evolve, replacement power sources could simply be plugged in, provided they can fit into standard boxes.
“Our black boxes on these trains are all exactly the same,” says Shooter.
“The current batteries will have different cell chemistries in the future. We will be able to change those batteries throughout the life of the train. That is really important. It is part of our bigger story of upcyling or recycling.
“The Welsh trains have batteries that are absolutely fine for that application. But at some point, we could fit them with newer batteries. There is no doubt that in five years’ time there will be a better battery than the Hoppecke ones we are currently fitting. And we aim to be able to just slide that in.”
Advocates of hydrogen power on the railway believe the battery business is already mature, whereas hydrogen remains in its infancy.
The rate of battery development, they argue, is limited. With vast sums already invested by the automotive sector, the scope for rapid innovation is diminishing. Only small incremental steps are likely, whereas with no hydrogen train yet in passenger service in the UK, the untapped potential is much greater.
“In one sense that is fair,” says Shooter. “But it is not fair in that the actual application of the battery technology is moving forward fast. We know what is coming next year and the year after.
“This fast charging technology, which we have pioneered, we hope will be the standard UK automatic battery charger, no matter whose trains couple to it. Once you have that, you are not limited by distance.
“However much of the UK will be electrified, everything left over has to be addressed by hydrogen or battery power, so the amount of future electrification is a very interesting number. I would say the technology is moving very quickly.”