ELECTRIFICATION & OLE
“Energy fl exibility and conservation are our big issues, and are increasingly signifi cant,” he said. “So why electrify the railway? It’s perceived as a clean technology. You can have all sorts of esoteric arguments saying ‘you’re still burning coal in a power station somewhere’, and ‘gas- fi red power stations produce carbon’, and that is true today. But, there’s a programme of building atomic power stations, which gets an awful lot of ridiculous press coverage…Those power stations will get built – they have to. Be in no doubt, if we don’t, some of your children or grandchildren will be eating their dinners off candle-lit tables. Also, the development of renewable technologies will move forward.
“A railway that has oil-burning trains is stuck with oil-burning motors. A railway that’s electric can tap into anything. It’s future-proof.”
Of course, he added, electric trains are lighter, cause less track damage, less stress to bridges and viaducts. “The infrastructure, as a result, has an extended life. So an electrifi ed railway is cheaper to run than a diesel railway.”
By 2050, he said, the price of oil will be “into the stratosphere”. “That isn’t long away, although t feels like it today. If we don’t start now, it’ll be too late.”
He gave a list of electrifi cation programmes now authorised (including, as the slide shows, Gospel Oak – Barking, though funding has not
been committed for that project yet).
“That challenges us: we’re going from famine to feast,” Dearman said. “There will need to be an intense period of equipment development. We’ve got to change and improve some of our technologies.”
He spoke of a “period of catch-up” and “an in- tense construction programme, which will test manufacturers, designers and construction companies, and project/programme manag- ers”.
The diffi culties of access and possessions alone will be a challenge, he said, second only to the incredible logistics challenge.
He praised the abilities and quality of the high output plant equipment Network Rail has bought, but noted that roughly 20% of any route isn’t “high output-able” – the junctions,
stations and so on. These also happen to be the parts of the network where it’s most diffi cult to get possessions, he noted.
Upgrading these sections using conventional methods will require vast amounts of plant, manpower and planning – the civils works alone include hundreds of structures, and almost all will need to be done over bank holidays. As part of the electrifi cation programme, Dearman said, the railway will build, test and commission equipment of a volume equivalent in scale to a small DNO, including grid supplies, transformers, switchgear/ substations, protection and control including fi bre optic communications links, cables and control centres.
He said the industry will need to install 200 OLE foundations a week for six years, as well as 200 steel support structures, eight miles of OLE wiring a week, a new substation every 3 weeks, a new grid supply every four months. The challenge in terms of materials, manpower, machines and access will be phenomenal, he said – but the result will be worth it.
More from the colloquium over the page. Peter Dearman
www.networkrail.co.uk/aspx/12273.aspx FOR MORE INFORMATION
rail technology magazine Jun/Jul 13 | 71
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