Engineering news
The money will be used to link HS2 – a high-speed rail line running from London to Birmingham – up with faster services between Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and York.
This so-called ‘Northern Powerhouse’ scheme has been mooted for a long time, as a way to bring growth to cities in the north of England. This was originally due to include full electrification of the lines from London to Sheffield and Manchester to Leeds, but these projects have since been scrapped.
The government’s latest decision represents a renewed commitment to improving transport links in the north. “This investment will go towards ensuring HS2 infrastructure can link up with future Northern Powerhouse and Midlands rail projects – helping the towns and cities of the North reach their full potential,” said Hammond.
Earlier, Rail Minister Paul Maynard said Northern Powerhouse Rail would help unlock the full benefits of HS2. "My view is there is no point in having HS2 if you don't have Northern Powerhouse Rail. The whole point of HS2 coming to the north is to reduce the north-south divide".
The announcement has been welcomed by the Railway Industry Association. “I am delighted to see the Chancellor commit to £300 million for new rail projects across the North,” said its chief executive Darren Caplan. “This funding is very much needed in order to speed up journey times and provide better services for passengers and freight customers across the region, and also to improve countrywide connectivity.”
It remains to be seen how the £300m investment will be used, but in the absence of full electrification, any new proposals are likely to rely on ‘bi-mode trains’ that can on both diesel and electric.
“The best solution would probably be to electrify all of the key routes in the UK,” Simon Iwnicki, Director of the University of Huddersfield’s Institute of Railway Research, told Professional Engineering. “But if this is not going happen in the near future then it’s true that we could look at alternative solutions which allow vehicles to run on alternative power sources and stored energy.”
He said that bi-mode trains were starting to come into use in the UK, with the new Hitachi fleets being supplied to Great Western and the Transpennine routes. They draw power from the overhead lines when they’re available, and use diesel engines when they’re not.
Iwnicki pointed out that “more radical” solutions could also be considered for railway applications. At the moment, electric trains can recover energy from braking and feed it back into the grid through overhead powerlines, but the bi-mode trains cannot currently do this when they’re running in diesel mode. New energy storage systems such as batteries, supercapacitors, fuel cells or even flywheels could potentially bridge this gap.