UK's First Rapid-Charging Battery Train Ready For Boarding
8 72An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The UK's first superfast-charging train running only on battery power will come into passenger service this weekend -- operating a five-mile return route in west London. Great Western Railway (GWR) will send the converted London Underground train out from 5.30am to cover the full Saturday timetable on the West Ealing to Greenford branch line, four stops and 12 minutes each way, and now carrying up to 273 passengers, should its celebrity stoke up the demand.
The battery will recharge in just three and a half minutes back at West Ealing station between trips, using a 2,000kW charger connected to a few meters of rail that only becomes live when the train stops directly overhead. There are hopes within government and industry that this technology could one day replace diesel trains on routes that have proved difficult or expensive to electrify with overhead wires, as the decarbonization of rail continues.
The train has proved itself capable of going more than 200 miles on a single charge -- last year setting a world record for the farthest travelled by a battery-electric train, smashing a German record set in 2021. The GWR train and the fast-charge technology has been trialled on the 2.5-mile line since early 2024, but has not yet carried paying passengers.
8 comments
Light passenger rail... (Score: 5, Interesting)
by PhantomHarlock ( 189617 ) on Friday January 30, 2026 @11:14PM (#65960416)
Light passenger rail is ideal for batteries. With lightweight trains and low rolling resistance, coupled with regenerative braking, it should be pretty easy on the batteries. The only issue would be the batteries catching fire underground...might be better for surface transport.
Re:Light passenger rail... (Score: 5, Informative)
by shilly ( 142940 ) on Saturday January 31, 2026 @02:47AM (#65960558)
The UK has a Victorian rail infrastructure that operates extremely intensively in a tightly constrained landscape, full of buried utilities, low overhead bridges made of stone that would need to be completely rebuilt, and lacking space at the side of the routes for transformers etc. Electrification costs a fortune, £8m per route mile. Third rail is dangerous and poorly suited to the unelectrified remaining UK routes, which are mainly intercity / freight and relatively lengthy, and it needs 750V DC, which needs way more current than 25kV AC.
Re:Light passenger rail... (Score: 5, Informative)
by shilly ( 142940 ) on Saturday January 31, 2026 @02:37AM (#65960554)
This is for heavy rail, not light rail. Light rail, including underground, is already electrified, at least in the UK.
Re:Light passenger rail... (Score: 5, Informative)
by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Saturday January 31, 2026 @03:22AM (#65960578)
LFP batteries are very unlikely to catch fire. You can find videos of people trying on YouTube, attacking them with power tools. One I saw only managed to set the plastic housing on fire with a blowtorch, the battery itself didn't ignite.
Plus most of the London Underground is actually above ground.
There is a train using batteries in Japan. It's not light rail, it's a conventional high-ish speed train. There is a section of the track that isn't electrified, which it uses a battery to bridge.
Re:Electric trains (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Barsteward ( 969998 ) on Saturday January 31, 2026 @01:28AM (#65960512)
Some person sitting at a keyboard calls bullshit on something he knows nothing about. Wow, classic slashdot
Re:Electric trains (Score: 5, Interesting)
by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Saturday January 31, 2026 @03:26AM (#65960588)
Welcome to the UK. It's extremely difficult and expensive to build anything, such as overhead wires or the hardware needed to support a third rail. The feasibility and safety study alone would probably cost hundreds of millions. We spent over a billion just looking at the feasibility of a tunnel under the Thames.
Much easier to just install a charger at one end of the line, and use battery powered trains.
Reminds me of efforts in Germany to install overhead wires on some roads, so that trucks could charge without stopping. Nice idea, but pointless given how cheap batteries are and how fast they can charge now.
Re:Just because we can, doesn't mean we should (Score: 5, Informative)
by Barsteward ( 969998 ) on Saturday January 31, 2026 @01:37AM (#65960518)
So many myths. 1. It's an LFP battery so no cobalt, nickel. 2. LFP has more battery cycles than NMC. 3. There is no lack of lithium, they got cheaper recently because of over abundance 4. If you are worried about mining in Congo, please return any rechargeable devices like cell phones, laptops etc for recycling and return to using pen and paper
Orders of magnitude cheaper than electrification (Score: 5, Insightful)
by shilly ( 142940 ) on Saturday January 31, 2026 @03:47AM (#65960622)
Just to give a rough sense, for a 100 mile intercity route, it would cost about £900m in capex to electrify in the UK (£8m per mile plus power supply upgrades etc at £100m). Deploying the BEV technology would cost about £40m in capex (8 trains at £3m per, 3 charge sites at £2m per, grid strengthening at £10m). BEV opex is mainly battery replacement, figure £24m; electrification opex is OLE and equipment, figure £200m. So it’s like 10% of the costs.
Electrification is justified where traffic density is high (4+ tph) or expected to be high, or where there’s lots of freight, high speeds, or long gaps between stations. That said, the UK has a terrible track record of failing to electrify, and personally, I’d rather see BEV passenger trains roll out now where they can, than wait for some putative full electrification that may well never happen