Great Western Coffee Shop

Various notices have gone out over the last couple of years to encourage drivers to save fuel (and therefore money) and reduce pollution (both noise and actual).  This is manifesting itself primarily on FGW by drivers shutting down engines of units which are going to stable or layover for more than a short while.  Other TOC's are trying to go even further, for example, First TransPennine's fleet of 185's are fitted with a fuel monitoring system that will cause engine(s) to idle when not required and I believe that management have been trying to get a system in place where drivers would be rewarded if they save a certain amount of fuel.

I'm all for it, as I found it particularly wasteful when a train just sat idling, in some cases for hours on end, with no sign of it moving.  There are issues to overcome, for example air conditioning, heating and lighting usually don't work when engines are switched off which might be a problem in the depths of winter or heights of summer.  Also, some types of traction are not as suitable to be switched off as others - for example, HST's take a long time to mobilise if both engines are switched off and if you only switch one off it really needs to be the one that's not supplying the trains electrical systems.  However, there's a lot we can still do to reduce the wastage of fuel.

I recently took the opportunity to look at a few 'black box' downloads at random to see what kind of driving potential FGW's men and women could achieve.  The standout of the ones I looked at was the 05:02 Worcester to Paddington service from a few weeks ago which maintained an on time arrival at all stations (except Oxford where it looks as if it was checked down to a red signal outside the station).  Of a route mileage of 57 miles the train (a HST) was either coasting or braking (i.e. not taking power) for a total of 28 miles - at almost 50% of the route miles.

It should be said that the schedule for this (and other) Cotswold Line services are fairly slack and the maximum line speed is 100mph.  Also the route is fairly undulating which lends itself well to prolonged coasting without the speed dipping too far, however I still found that impressive enough to post on here, and give further credence to the railway's green image.

But it's fuel efficiency would have even better had been an electric with regen brakes.

Well, I can't argue with that.  Though FGW doesn't exactly run many electrified services, save for their share of the Heathrow Connect services.

A big start could be made by improving how airtight the air systems are. I might shut the engine down if I didn't think all the air would be gone in 10 minutes.

The 15x used to keep their air up for literally days when they were new. All those long lengths of knackered Neophrene pipe inside the bodies for the door air and things like Horns and wipers may have a lot to do with it.

And if your stabling units in platforms a lot of the time the engine needs to be left running simply to keep the tail lights lit, although this is less of a problem with the new LED head / tail light clusters.

Haing been told by one of their drivers what the fuel consumption figures are for a class 185 I can well understand why FTPex are rather keen to do the Eco Mode modfication and encourage their drivers not to cane the things harder than is neccessary to keep to schedule timings.

The Eco Mode shuts the third engine down rather than letting it idle, the units are designed so that the electrics on the dead car will crossfeed from the other cars in the set. Two engines on full load is more fuel efficient than three engines on part load.

Drivers with a, now defunct, freight company were encouraged to coast where possible. On one, with an impatient following passenger train, was pulled up at the next signal..."what's wrong driver?"..."nowt mate, company policy to coast to save fuel!"

Nothingnew about coasting either. Loads of stations in the NSE area have coasting boards to indicate where TPTB thought you could shut off and not loose time. *some* were in the right place.