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Germany has introduced its first hydrogen powered passenger rail services, according to CNN  (https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/coradia-ilint-hydrogen-trains/index.html) and others.


(Continues at source)

This looks like good news, and might even be good news. Landesnahverkehrsgesellschaft might not be a name on everyone's lips just yet, but this is a big development, with the promise of more to come across commuter networks. From the point of view of other countries, it is an ideal way to watch someone else test the theories at their expense and risk, rather than your own, to see how well the whole thing works from production of hydrogen to operations, and to evaluate the costs when compared to other options like OHLE or batteries. The latter of those seems to be losing ground in the race to power trains.

The production of the hydrogen is probably the elephant in the room. Germany is a long way from being green in energy, and is getting further away by the day. It may yet keep its nuclear power stations open longer than originally envisaged, but is using more coal to compensate for the loss of the gas imports from Russia. The article doesn't cover this aspect, but if a mountainside is covered with solar panels or wind turbines to produce hydrogen for the trains while more lignite is dug for the grid, it ceases to be an overall contributor to a solution to the carbon problem. But it will remove emissions from where it runs, even if the practical outcome is transferring them to somewhere else.

Cuxhaven, at the end of this route, is another of those places pitching to become an "hydrogen hub" (https://www.afw-cuxhaven.de/en/sectors/renewable-energy/):

Germany as a whole has a large and inherently variable wind power source, the fluctuations of which already dictate generation patterns across Europe, and Cuxhaven is in the middle of prime wind territory - onshore, offshore, and on Heligoland. So the idea of banking electricity when it's surplus to usability in the form of hydrogen might even work there, if it can anywhere. Provided someone stumps up for all those electrolysers, of course.

But basically it's just another step in a long development and proving process for hydrogen trains, and an encouraging one on the whole.

...on the other hand, Baden-Württemberg have just decided not to go down the hydrogen route at all - from International Rail Journal (https://www.railjournal.com/fleet/baden-wurttemberg-rejects-hydrogen-as-diesel-alternative/)

They are proposing a mix of electrification and battery EMUs instead.

Hydrogen power undoubtedly works to an extent, but is inherently expensive, complicated, and somewhat dangerous.
OTOH, electric trains are an established technology, and batteries are still improving.

The future is in my view electrification wherever practical, with battery power being used when restricted clearances or extreme conditions make OHLE impractical.

Producing hydrogen is easy, but storage is expensive, as is compressing or liquefying the gas.

Nail hit squarely on the head. NASA's travails with its Artemis spacecraft show that even rocket scientists struggle with hydrogen. I have seen something in one of the tech websites lately about using salts to store hydrogen. The article says the salts yield the hydrogen easily, and it can be effectively replaced for reuse. Whether this is serious or just the desperate withdrawal symptoms of the subsidy junkie is a matter beyond my limited scientific competence. If it is serious, it sounds so basic that one might think it had cropped up as an idea before, but it could be bad news for bakers if sodium bicarbonate suddenly gets popular as a fuel for trains. There remains the question of how the hydrogen is made and transported for use, of course.

There's a rather rambling piece on hydrogen storage system developments, that looks superficially to be about rail transport but actually looks at the wider picture on the BBC News website, Business section - see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62619313

It is difficult to work out from this how close we might be to a breakthrough in low pressure storage, but at least it looks like quite a few groups are working on it.

Over the sea in Canada, and 75 years ago, they were already predicting the demise of the newly adopted diesel locomotives – but not electrification, let alone hydrogen...
https://youtu.be/6_RE2Ku4eCU?t=909

 :o

I have just caught this You Tube video from Sabine Hossenfelder, whose channel I have recently discovered. She is a German scientist with a mission to explain science clearly to those of us with arts or humanities backgrounds and others.  As you will see, she does not share some of her compatriots' enthusiasm for hydrogen, indeed on close analysis there seems little to gain from most methods of hydrogen fuel production in terms of carbon reduction

See - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zklo4Z1SqkE.

That's what happens when you ask a scientist, with their analytical approaches, laws of physics and other inconvenient stuff.

Interesting. It does rather confirm the theory that hydrogen is a clever but expensive way of making a lot of electricity into a lot less electricity.

We should probably just think of it as being like an amplifier but connected backwards…  ???

Paul