Rules and Guidelines
Want to participate in the discussions? Please read our Community Rules and Guidelines. Need some help? Visit Support and Answers.

  • State Not Answered
  • Locked Locked
  • Replies 29 replies
  • Subscribers 17 subscribers
  • Views 3418 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Options
You may also be interested in
This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

HS2 railway

CliveS
We would all agree that an express link fro London to Birmingham and Manchester would be of great benefit BUT do we have to electrify the entire length of track or just the parts inside city boundaries. 

We can half the construction/infrastructure cost if we use diesel electric trains cross country and convert to electric only inside the city. 

This is environmentally friendly as power stations are only 60% efficient at best and mostly use gas at normal/peak times anyway; isn't it ??
Parents
  • 0
    Just one more thought, taking this a step further: I may well be wrong, and would be delighted to be so, however it seems to me that we are really bad in the UK at making whole life environmental assessments of future engineering options. Carrying on the examples above, I think (but I'm prepared to be proved wrong) that this has been done pretty well for electric trains, however I'm struggling to find authoritative and truly independent evidence for the overall environmental benefit of electric cars, from cradle to grave of both the cars themselves, and of the cars they are replacing. (They probably are a benefit, but it's hard to find info which doesn't link back to someone trying to sell you a shiny new electric car! E.g. James Dyson this week.). It is always hugely complex, and generally you can't easily separate issues out into neat bite-size chunks - e.g. the fact that there is an interaction between the use of cars and the use of trains.


    So, to finally get to my point, as an engineering profession should we be encouraging the development of far more environmental audit engineers to ensure questions like Clive's are definitely answered as correctly as possible, and should we be considering how truly independent (or at least unbiased) wide ranging audits could be carried out to inform policy decisions?


    Thanks,


    Andy
Reply
  • 0
    Just one more thought, taking this a step further: I may well be wrong, and would be delighted to be so, however it seems to me that we are really bad in the UK at making whole life environmental assessments of future engineering options. Carrying on the examples above, I think (but I'm prepared to be proved wrong) that this has been done pretty well for electric trains, however I'm struggling to find authoritative and truly independent evidence for the overall environmental benefit of electric cars, from cradle to grave of both the cars themselves, and of the cars they are replacing. (They probably are a benefit, but it's hard to find info which doesn't link back to someone trying to sell you a shiny new electric car! E.g. James Dyson this week.). It is always hugely complex, and generally you can't easily separate issues out into neat bite-size chunks - e.g. the fact that there is an interaction between the use of cars and the use of trains.


    So, to finally get to my point, as an engineering profession should we be encouraging the development of far more environmental audit engineers to ensure questions like Clive's are definitely answered as correctly as possible, and should we be considering how truly independent (or at least unbiased) wide ranging audits could be carried out to inform policy decisions?


    Thanks,


    Andy
Children
No Data

Community Rules & Guidelines