BEMUs being in use by a handful of British and Japanese railways and is pretty much tantamount to them not existing. There is zero manufacturing base, expertise, or experience on this continent.
MassDOT Rail: Springfield Hub (East-West, NNERI, Berkshires, CT-Valley-VT-Quebec)
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Now you're just reinventing the definition of existing Mr goal post
As a person who has lived most of my life in a "3rd world country without enough Labor protections, so US should not compare itself with", the issue in Massachusetts (the only state that I have lived in the US) is NOT the money that is spent. It doesn't seem to be spent in acquiring the right capabilities. And it could be that the capabilities no longer exist - Maybe the reason that the money is spent on consultants rather than on implementation could be that the consultant expertise exists, and the implementation capabilities do not exist.
There is not even a capability to spend money, as shown recently in refunding tax income.
There is not even a capability to spend money, as shown recently in refunding tax income.
Brattle Loop
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Not really. "Exists somewhere in the world" is not meaningfully relevant to "exists in the US". Multiple US transit agencies (including the MBTA repeatedly) have encountered severe difficulties in introducing new technologies in rail vehicles when attempting to import overseas designs (or use new-entrant foreign manufacturers). No one on this continent has any meaningful experience in making, repairing, or operating vehicles like this, meaning that you have to develop all of those things (to some degree) before they're even potentially a viable option. Something which becomes even harder when, as Tallguy points out, they cost more to begin with.
Yes, technically BEMUs exist. They do not exist in any meaningful way as a viable option for the MBTA, or really for pretty much any US operator with the possible exception of Amtrak in limited circumstances. To make them a meaningful possibility requires far more than just the vehicles, and that adds an upfront cost in terms of money, difficulty, and so forth, that stands as a considerable inhibition to their introduction.
The EGE
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Here is what Wikipedia lists for current BEMU operators:
en.wikipedia.org
Much of the above list is used on lighter suburban/branch lines where the BEMUs are cheaper than electrifying, or to allow a non-electric line to through-run with electric services. The MBTA's claim of "BEMUs and partial electrification will be cheaper than EMUs and full electrification" is an oddity, especially since much of that seems to be based on low-clearance bridges where a much smaller battery to ensure smooth passage through the gap would be fine.
Battery electric multiple unit - Wikipedia
- Australia: one converted heritage car; modern streetcars on one system
- Austria: one test set introduced in 2019
- Denmark: 113 units ordered in 2022 after testing a small number
- France: 5 converted test cars
- Germany: 55 units on one system entered service in 2022; a second system planned for this December
- Georgia: 1 unit for a cave railway
- Ireland: unknown percentage of a large 2019 order will be BEMUs
- Japan: about 25 sets in use on several lines
- Latvia: 9 sets under construction
- UK: several test/demonstrator sets
Much of the above list is used on lighter suburban/branch lines where the BEMUs are cheaper than electrifying, or to allow a non-electric line to through-run with electric services. The MBTA's claim of "BEMUs and partial electrification will be cheaper than EMUs and full electrification" is an oddity, especially since much of that seems to be based on low-clearance bridges where a much smaller battery to ensure smooth passage through the gap would be fine.
Nonsense, that seems like just an alternative definition of does not exist. When several friendly nations have had the technology implemented for years. The correct answer to "do we have BEMU's?" Is "we have not made the investment" not "they do not exist " they exist in a meaningful way in this world. Just like we don't have maglevs or investment in high speed rail, they are commonplace in places one traveled, just not here. We can have them here. We just haven't spent the money or political capital
They don't make sense for Boston, except for a few niche routes, perhaps outer Fitchburg and Rockport. The T is just extremely averse to catenary.
They might not make sense for boston, this is true
Koopzilla24
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Japan only has 23 BEMUs total operating on a few primarily rural lines that are 17mi at the longest. I can see these being a somewhat realistic option for maybe the North Adams-Adams rail line or the potential Newport shuttle in New England but that’s about it that comes to mind.
F-Line to Dudley
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Probably not. Because you have to have some wire-ups to net a charge that can cover the distance. And if you're going to have some wire-ups, you're going to be paying for 25 kV substations...substations being the most expensive part of an electrification scheme. So you'd be paying for the costliest installment of electrification on the P&W any which way, which is not going to wash with what the service levels project out to on that lower-value corridor. In the real world that's a service you'd consider DMU's for...not BEMU's. Alon Levy is required reading for why it doesn't scale economically.
Again...the consensus application for BEMU's is on low-volume branchlines that branch off an electrified, frequent-service mainline. Such that you avoid needing to electrify on the branches whose service levels are too low to amortize the cost of electrifying. It's not done as a get out of jail free card for avoiding electrifying the mains. As Levy's analysis shows, you're still building roughly the same number of substations because the battery trains have to voraciously suck juice for charging somewhere along the route (and voraciously suck they do when they're in charge mode...much moreso than a straight EMU), while getting worse performance from the trains which are overweight and frequently underpowered as consequences of fitting in the bulky batteries. It'd be one thing if the T analyzed the Newburyport and Rockport branches and surmized 1) branch frequencies + 2) general unavailability of grid power lines making wire-ups extra-expensive = potential BEMU application. Although at 30-minute Regional Rail frequencies, Newburyport and Rockport are each getting plenty electrification-amortizable service slates...so they don't fit the mold of "podunk branches" that track with real-world BEMU applications ("podunk" service levels being why the unit quantities are so uniformly small for the systems that have adopted them). That's not what they're doing, though. The T's actual plan leaves North Station-Chelsea unwired on the Eastern Route mainline, leaves the 15-minute service Fairmount Line almost totally unwired, and leaves significant portions of the Worcester Line service layer cake un-wired.
Ass-backwards, upside-down, and costlier overall...because they're spending 2-3x as much for the vehicles (which are significantly more maintenance-intensive than straight EMU's), while still buying the same number of substations. OCS itself (poles, wire, circuit breakers, etc.) is a relatively minor linear fixed cost. And vertical clearance restrictions aren't a significant irritant on the first wave of lines they want to electrify. Straight EMU's can coast under a dead section under a particularly tight bridge just fine (they even come stock with small batteries to avoid getting stuck...or "gapping"...at a dead stop under a dead section)...and the first lines they want to electrify have few to no freight-induced clearance issues (even Worcester, because of CSX sunsetting all of its former Beacon Park freight clearances and contractually busting down its former Westborough-Framingham autorack clearances a couple feet).
Their claims of cost savings don't pass the smell test...but they too smell an awful lot like a sandbagging job.
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If I may agree/summarize F-Line to focus on "Almost everywhere EMU with an OCS (Overhead Contact System), and almost-never BEMU"
1) since electric trains need about the same MWh ("fuel") whether they sip it through a wire or gulp it into a battery, the substations ("fuel pumps") are similar capacity and cost the same (or more for BEMU)-and they're the biggest capital cost so save the weight/lethargy and battery costs of BEMUs and spend it instead on on OCS (Overhead Contact System)
2) EMUs with small modern batteries can go briefly unpowered in under a bridge that's too low to safely string a wire under, so that OCS can be much cheaper than of old when you'd have to price in the cost of physically raising bridges (or lowering track) to get enough space above the train and below the bridge.
(So you'd use a BEMU to extend service very limited cases like from Boston to Wickford Junction to Quonset or West Kingston to Narragansett Pier, if they still existed, but quickly find you'd rather a common EMU fleet and just wire the suckers up)
1) since electric trains need about the same MWh ("fuel") whether they sip it through a wire or gulp it into a battery, the substations ("fuel pumps") are similar capacity and cost the same (or more for BEMU)-and they're the biggest capital cost so save the weight/lethargy and battery costs of BEMUs and spend it instead on on OCS (Overhead Contact System)
2) EMUs with small modern batteries can go briefly unpowered in under a bridge that's too low to safely string a wire under, so that OCS can be much cheaper than of old when you'd have to price in the cost of physically raising bridges (or lowering track) to get enough space above the train and below the bridge.
(So you'd use a BEMU to extend service very limited cases like from Boston to Wickford Junction to Quonset or West Kingston to Narragansett Pier, if they still existed, but quickly find you'd rather a common EMU fleet and just wire the suckers up)
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F-Line to Dudley
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Put it this way...BEMU's would make sense on the T if we still had a class of clear tertiary branchlines left on the system. Like the Marblehead Branch or Stoneham Branch...places that are not going to merit any more than hourly service due to native demand and over the fact that they'd vulture too many more usefully applied frequencies (Rockburyport, Lowell/Haverhill) from the rest of the pie if they did pulse up too much. That's basically what LIRR was thinking with its (now failed and scrapped) attempt to convert a few straight EMU's into BEMU's. Their primary application was intended to be on the very light-service Oyster Bay Branch and outer un-electrified tail of the Port Jefferson Branch. Oyster Bay definitely qualifies as a tertiary branch under any rational ridership calculation, while Port Jeff is borderline (one could make a reasonable argument for full electrification there).
We don't have any branches like that anymore. Newburyport/Rockport (and Peabody!) all merit 30-minute service individually. So does Stoughton easily. So does the Old Colony trio easily if the Dorchester-Braintree mainline were simply double-tracked to enable it. So would Needham, which is why rapid transit conversion is being considered there (because it can't do 30-min. churn so long as it's attached to the NEC). You'd have to go back to the days of Millis or the Central Mass to find tippy-top demand that would be outright wasted on sub-hourly service, or back 65 years to the days of the Marblehead, Stoneham, Medford Square, Saugus, et al. branches to find examples where there was a decided third-tier schedule on a given mainline's churn. We aren't set up like these systems that are adopting BEMU's for true tertiary branches and tails.
We don't have any branches like that anymore. Newburyport/Rockport (and Peabody!) all merit 30-minute service individually. So does Stoughton easily. So does the Old Colony trio easily if the Dorchester-Braintree mainline were simply double-tracked to enable it. So would Needham, which is why rapid transit conversion is being considered there (because it can't do 30-min. churn so long as it's attached to the NEC). You'd have to go back to the days of Millis or the Central Mass to find tippy-top demand that would be outright wasted on sub-hourly service, or back 65 years to the days of the Marblehead, Stoneham, Medford Square, Saugus, et al. branches to find examples where there was a decided third-tier schedule on a given mainline's churn. We aren't set up like these systems that are adopting BEMU's for true tertiary branches and tails.
Java King
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I'm 60. Do you think I'll be alive to see this? LOL .......I'm not holding my breath, but it would be FANTASTIC.
yup. think the inability to get public projects done here is the biggest surprise I've found since moving to the US. And it's not a cash problem or a labor cost issue.
As far as I can see, it's bureaucracy gone nuts. We can chat about EMUs or BEMUs till the cows come home, we wont see either till well after my 4 year old has gone to college.
When there's public money, everyone has to have a slice and there is a public apathy about making any infrastructure other than roads a political priority.
The GLX path here in Somerville is a tiny but perfect example.
F-Line to Dudley
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Springfield-Boston was an "A-Day" acquisition in 1971 that continued the pre-Amtrak rights of Penn Central passenger trains to run on the Inland Route (though there was a brief interruption in actual service shortly before '71). Per Amtrak's birth charter, those trackage rights and passenger equipment were conveyed free in exchange for Penn Central being relieved of the burden of running those trains. The Lake Shore Ltd. Boston section was not an A-Day route, being first instituted in 1975. The LSL Boston trackage rights were finagled in the federal legislation that created Conrail from Penn Central's ashes: Amtrak got the route under de facto A-Day rights in exchange for Conrail (feds) rebuilding the B&A corridor for freight, and Amtrak taking on ownership and rebuild of the B&A Post Road Branch (Schodack, NY to Rensselaer). The mainline rebuild took place during the very early 1980's. That's when the second track went away under the change from uni-directional to bi-directional signaling.
Amtrak didn't get any ownership or dispatching authority in its birth legislation, which has arguably been the whole network's Achilles heel. They only control the interlockings right at Springfield Union Station, which they got in the 1976 purchase agreement for the NEC and Springfield Lines from Conrail. But the B&A passenger schedules have been at the mercy of punitive freight prioritization for 50 years now, though moreso during the bad-neighbor Conrail era than with CSX (especially since the T took over Worcester-Framingham dispatch in 2009). Inland schedules, which were never all that flush to begin with, shed business because they were so oft-delayed...leading to the long draw-down and eventual cancellation of the route in 2004. The Vermonter, when it ran on the B&A from 1995-2014, was similarly notorious for how oft-delayed it was by switching traffic at Palmer Yard. All allowances for future passenger traffic increases date to the quid pro quos that MassDOT secured from CSX 2 years ago to earn the state's blessing for the Pan Am merger. The current grant application for jump-starting a couple Inland slots with speed improvements and new passing sidings follows that new framework, and the two parties have a M.O.U. on who pays what for anything that scales up-to and including the East-West and NNEIRI study recs.
Is that MOU a public document and is it available electronically?
F-Line to Dudley
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There's a generic blurb in the PAR acquisition docket with the Surface Transportation Board about settling their differences on passenger slots, and maybe enough specifics about the current grant application...but most of the far future-leaning stuff was privately communicated quid pro quos. For example, MassDOT has a long-stalled bridge clearance project in West Springfield that's been sitting in proposal for over a decade that CSX dearly wants because it would open up a superior truck route to the intermodal side of West Springfield Yard (allowing them to significantly upsize the volumes processed by the intermodal yard). Moving on that one is with certainly a privately agreed-upon requirement to advancing any portion of East-West past the current grant app, but it wouldn't be in the STB docket in part because CSX doesn't want to tip off its competitors about the hugeness of the revenue implications of such a move. Things like adding +20 MPH to the track with a track class uprate to Class 4 also wouldn't be enumerated in the public filings because of playing close-to-vest the economics of running freight faster.
F-Line to Dudley
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Alon Levy of the opinion that the Inland Route is a bad idea, and that New York-Boston should always go through Providence, never Worcester: https://pedestrianobservations.com/...ty-trains-into-boston-enter-from-springfield/
Discuss.
Discuss.