Thursday Trains Summer Series: Hydrogen-Powered Trains!

The Thursday Trains series reaches its last station today, and concludes by examining a new railway development that may become much more common in the future.

Hydrogen fuel cells are a surprisingly old technology. The first one was created by Welsh physicist and inventor Sir William Robert Grove in 1839. Although this fuel cell used hydrogen and oxygen gas to produce electricity and water as byproducts, the cell didn’t produce enough power to be useful. For much of history, the story has remained the same: hydrogen fuel cells are very expensive to manufacture for the amount of energy that they produce.

In addition, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have been promised to the public for decades, but have yet to be mass-produced. As with fuel cells themselves, the first hydrogen-powered car was invented a surprising number of decades ago. The 1966 GM Electrovan is the first hydrogen fuel cell vehicle ever, and had a surprising range of 120 miles (193 kms).

Still, even today it is rare to find hydrogen-fuel cell cars on the market. In fact, at the time of this writing there are only three hydrogen-powered cars available for purchase: the Toyota Mirai, Hyundai Nexo, and the Honda Clarity. It is difficult to expand the market for fuel cell cars when so few charging stations are available. In the US, only 49 public hydrogen refueling stations exist, and 48 of these are in California!

Since this series is called Thursday Trains and not Thursday Cars, let us now return to the realm of the railway. Similar to hydrogen-powered cars, hydrogen fuel cell trains are not a brand-new invention (although they are much newer than hydrogen-powered automobiles). In 2006, the East Japan Railway Company created the first hydrogen-powered railcar, and various hydrogen-powered locomotive and railcar prototypes have appeared at conventions since that year.

Then, in Qingdao, China in 2015, the Chinese South Rail Corporation tested the first hydrogen fuel cell tram, and the country is already investing the equivalent of $32 billion USD to build tracks for this tram.

Germany was the first country to put hydrogen-powered trains into service. In 2018, the nation’s Coradia iLint began its service in Lower Saxony. This Corodia iLint can atain speeds of up to 140 kph (87 mph) and can run up to 800 km (500 mph) on its tank of hydrogen. Right now the hydrogen cell is refilled via a mobile station, but Germany is planning to finish a stationary refueling station by the end of the year, and is also planning on building 14 more of the Coradia iLint. Many of these trainsets will replace current diesel vehicles.

The UK entered the hydrogen-powered train game in 2019 with its tests of the Hydroflex train. The Hydroflex’s fuel is stored in 4 high-pressure tanks that (uner the current design) are situated inside one of the passenger cars. The engineers working on the Hydroflex project believe that hydrogen-powered trains are a useful way of decarbonizing the railways without having to spend large sums of money to electrify the tracks. In fact, it is even possible to retrofit certain diesel trains with hydrogen fuel cells.

The fuel tanks on the Hydroflex can currently store enough hydrogen to run the train for three hours. Altogether, the hydrogen weighs only 20 kg, but as a diffuse gas it is difficult to store in a compact manner. The issue of hydrogen storage is one that still needs to be solved for long-distance train travel.

German multinational corporation Siemens has begun to construct its own hydrogen-powered train. Testing for this train will begin in 2023, and the two-car train is expected to enter service in Bavaria the year after. Similar to the Hydroflex in the UK, Siemen’s new hydrogen-powered train is considered to be an important part of moving the German transport sector away from fossil fuels. The train is expected to have a range of 800 km (500 miles).

North America will not be left out of the hydrogen fuel cell party either. Canadian Pacific is expecting to have a working locomotive as part of its Hydrogen Locomotive Program by 2022. Last but not least, these revolutionary trains may soon be part of the US rail network. California’s Energy Commission has given the Sierra Northern Railway a $4 million grant to develop and test a hydrogen fuel cell locomotive. The Sierra Northern Railway expects that this new locomotive will replace diesel ones, saving 12 million gallons (45 million liters) of diesel annually.

There are still some technical challenges towards deploying hydrogen fuel cell trains and using them for long-distance travel. But several innovative companies are proving that the age of hydrogen-powered locomotives is not 50 years in the future – it is closer than we think.