Trains will leave only when the wind blows

It has not been the happiest Easter for anyone whose holiday plans might have involved using my nearest railway station in the beautiful city of Bath. For four days this weekend, Brunel’s handsome Bath Spa station has been closed. This is to allow for engineering works to prepare it for the new electric trains which, on the line from Paddington to Bristol, are to replace our 40-yea- old diesel 125s.

This is part of a scheme which, when announced in 2013, we were told would cost £875 million and be completed by 2018.

But last November we learnt that the cost had tripled to £2.8 billion and it would not be finished until 2024. Part of the reason for this soaring bill and six-year delay was that no one had foreseen the difficulty of “upgrading” Brunel’s Box Tunnel and other structures along the line to accommodate the necessary electrical infrastructure.

So when the new trains being built for the Great Western Railway by a Japanese company in Italy come into service this October, they will be what is known as “bi-mode”: running on diesel until they can switch over to electric when work is complete. And much more commodious they will be, I am told, able to carry 20 per cent more passengers and cut journey times by as much as six minutes.

But the bit of the story which is missing lies in the Government’s intention that, within 15 years or so, all our railway system should be electrified. This is to help meet the Climate Change Act’s requirement that Britain cut its CO2 emissions by 80 per cent before 2050.

Apparently this can only be achieved by switching from gas to electricity for our cooking and heating, from petrol to electricity for 60 per cent of the cars on our roads, and from diesel to electricity for 100 per cent of our trains.

All this, of course, will require a huge expansion in our electricity supply. And if you ask the Government where all this “zerocarbon” electricity is to come from, they will tell you that it can’t possibly come from the dirty old fossil fuels which still currently provide more than half our electricity (unless power stations are fitted with “carbon capture and storage”, which has never been shown to work on such a scale).

Virtually all of it therefore will have to come from “renewables”, such as wind, solar and burning waste and wood: plus, of course, those new nuclear power stations the French and the Chinese are meant to be building for us, but which now seem to be like the ever-receding mirage of an oasis in the desert.

We may imagine the day when passengers arriving at Paddington wishing to travel down to Bath in those agreeable new trains will be told: “The train now standing at Platform 8 will leave when the wind starts blowing again, and the sun comes out from behind those clouds.”