Great Western Coffee Shop

Given that Sir Andrew Foster has been asked to "Provide an independent assessment of the value for money of the IEP programme and the credibility and value of ANY ALTERNATIVES which meet the programmes objectives", the latest Modern Railways magazine conducted an assessment of how all the "Credible alternatives" performed compared to IEP.A class 55 Deltic with 8 coaches with 10hp/ton provided the base line for the assessment.Interestingly a IC125 2+8 comes out at 10.83hp/ton.All the proposed bi-mode configurations of 7 car/9 car/10 car fell below the Deltic power to weight threshhold of 8.60/6.58/6.06 hp/ton.To cut a long story short the best performance/Value for money solution it found for an austerity Great Western main line electrification was to replace one power car of an IC125 with a new electric loco and use the other power car as a driving unit.Using the latest Euro electric loco the Traxx, the Traxx+10 Mk3s came out at 18.26hp/ton with a healthy 300kN of tractive effort.Also if needed you have limited bi-mode capability for a short distance beyond the wires from the diesel power car.Remember the class 91 test sets, where one electric loco replaced one power car of an IC125.Traction and Rolling stock costs are an important factor in the business case for electrification.For West of England the obvious solution it says is a further re-engineered IC125 including power doors and retention tanks.IEP would have had the ludicrous situation of the diesel engine dragging the pantograph and transformer the 250 miles to Penzance after the wires ended at Newbury.What this does is to maintain service quality at an affordable price until hopefully the wires are eventually extended westwards.
 Thoughts!

Replacing a diesel power car with an electric one on HST sets you sill end up dragging a dead weight (pan and transformer) 250 miles from Newbury to Penzance. also either the electric power car will have to have a single phase to 3 phase converter to provide power (ETH) for train services (air con battery charging lighting etc), rewire the ETH in the coaches or leave the diesel running to provide the ETH.

A solution could actually be to re power car the HST sets used on the Bristol and South Wales runs with an electric power car and DVT and continue with diesel powered for the west of england, still left with the ETH problem for the Bristol / South Wales but that may be an easy fix with an inverter that way the coaches stay standard