Steam Loco Carbon Emissions

In the first part of Steam Railway's interesting interview with Michael Whitehouse (SR549), he said that a 'Castle' burning seven tonnes of coal on a Welsh Marches train, 250 miles with 300 passengers was pretty much the same in carbon emissions as a couple driving a two-litre petrol car doing the same distance.

Can anyone with more knowledge than me comment on this? I did wonder if perhaps he meant the loco's emissions being divided by the number of passengers/couples.

 

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Is he calculating per passenger?
(And ignoring how they all got there too, which is an interesting point. The Castle may burn 7 tonnes of coal, but the total carbon output of the activity of holding the special is significantly larger. OTOH, if enough people were sufficiently impoverished by the outrageous pricing (or laid low by apoplexy over the use of a diesel on the back) that they didn't fly somewhere, the whole activity is a small reduction in emissions)

 

I've seen this mooted somwhere before and I believe it would be referring to a steam loco with a full train and C02 per passenger mile.

 

I'm sure @Jamessquared will correct my maths if I'm wrong! It's about 2.5 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of coal burnt, so around 18 tonnes for 7 tonnes of coal. 300 passengers equals 60kg of CO2. A car using 50 litres of petrol will emit 120kg of CO2, so if there's two people in the car, 60kg per person.

 

Any steam locomotive is a mobile environmental disaster and that's all can be said about it.

 

But is it though when compared to HGVs, cruise liners, air travel, diesel locomotives and a host of other sources of pollution some of which is carcenogenic?

It is time for the steam movement to wise up regarding just how polluting our operations are so that a sense of proportion prevails.

 

I think the maths is broadly right.

The difficulty though with that sort of calculation is that there are all sorts of external factors not included. For example, the loco may have used 7 tonnes on the trip, but it may have used more for positioning moves etc. More significantly, the passengers haven't caught the train because they want to go from A to B: it is a leisure pursuit (and probably many of them will have driven to and from their starting point). So there is a big carbon emission from running such a trip, not all of which comes from the loco.

Essentially it is frivolous activity, but there is lots of frivolous activity. I'm not sure a headline like "the loco only has the same emissions as people driving the same distance" helps, because there are so many easy ways to counter it: ("It's still more than if they had gone using an electric train" or even "but they didn't need to go"). My feeling is that its more productive to consider the environmental impact in terms of what the alternatives might have been: how much emissions would there be had all those passengers spent an equivalent amount on attending a premiership football match? Or buying an equivalent value of clothes from some fast fashion retailer? Or hopping on a cheap flight to Spain? If you accept that people will want an existence that goes beyond the bare necessities of homes, clothes and food, then a certain amount of frivolous activity will take place that has an environmental impact: steam trains are worse than some, but better than others. It's not really germane to mainline operation, but I think heritage railways could shout louder from the rooftop about habitat creation; for example a well-managed line side will encourage wildflower growth etc. That has to be better than trolling round a shopping mall buying clothes that will be worn once and then discarded.

Tom

 

Which, I seem to recall, was Railtrack's answer to why they let lineside vegetation grow as they did - "it's a linear nature reserve".

 

indeed, if we wanted to preserve the whole railway as accurately as the stations there’s a lot of logging needed on most railways…

 

Indeed. But it’s still a useful nature reserve if managed as a wildflower meadow; as low bushes cut at regular intervals; or as a mixture (as most linesides are!). Trees are not the only sort of nature.

One hopes that lines that do grow substantial trees do end up selling the resulting firewood when the time comes for coppicing or felling; that does help make the management of the lineside greener.

Good lineside habitat management is something we ought to be publicising when we can. Much of the public is receptive to arguments like this, if we bother to explain them.

 

Of course this is part of the reason why I think that preserving EMUs in operating condition is something the preservation community should take more of an interest in...

But the carbon emissions of heritage steam operations are going to be so small as to not even be a blip. The more pressing concern will obviously be finding suitable fuel as coal and oil become increasingly uneconomic to produce as demand dries up, though thankfully that does not seem to be an insurmountable problem. It would also probably help to look at ways of reducing emissions from sources other than operating the trains...

 

Not strictly true. There's one 141R in France (an oil burner) now running on Dertal 600, an oil derived from pine trees. It will eventually be joined by a second 141R, operated by the same group.

http://transportrail.canalblog.com/archives/2023/01/01/39763852.html