Trains coasting downhill to save fuel

If there are no safety issues then I don't see a problem with that.

Just seems like a lot hassle to turn the engine on and off, on and off, on and off..

Just took the photo while waiting for a tube to London. Mohan Wickramasinghe from Sri Lanka.

mosria has contributed a photo to this story.

Does one need power for brakes?

campdavemorecambe has contributed a photo to this story.

It's all part of a bigger picture , We're 30 to 40 years behind in this country , on the Continent most trains are electric , there isn't the problem of third world style overcrowding on trains either , over there and no extortionate eye watering fares too !.

Two decades of electrification progress , skills and equipment have been lost in Britain as European countries continued to electrify , Britain stopped when Mandarins chose to fragment and privatize .

The dithering costs Britain dear but the New Labour Government sees no harm in procrastinating because fares can keep rocketing to cover rising costs and to ration rail travel according to the limited capacity available on such an expensive network .

The protestations of the Private Train Operating Companies are a bit of a red herring as fuel is bought well in advance .

The government in turn is far too fond of the cash it earns from transport oils and has steadily raised duty on railway diesel .

The New Labour government has vested interests in procuring hundreds more diesel powered carriages ( with 30 - year life-spans ) . Tougher emissions standards will raise construction costs and the banks which profitably own and lease these diesel trains to the Train Operating companies insist on recouping their outlay in case the oil market makes these new trains uneconomic to run after 10 to 20 years .

Ruth Kelly's dim witted Whitehall officials are still trying to convince manufacturers to produce a diesel powered intercity train which will be costly as any such design is specific to Britain as other countries don't want it because they've electrified their main lines .

In fact the German's have had to build rickety , mangled track to test these diesel trains on . Maintenance is in the hands of large building companies and the unskilled armies of building site labourers , whistleblowers have raised serious concerns , senior engineering and maintenance staff are reluctant to travel on certain lines , there has been a unprecedented rise in train crashes and a derailment level comparable to the bombed out and damaged post war 1940's .

After a botched disastrous privatization by the Tory Major Government , the business case for electrification still remained ( electric trains were simpler , lighter but more efficient and more reliable ) but electrifying a route needed complex agreements between infrastructure owner , transient train operator and train leasing company . With no form of leadership in this dysfunctional country , each followed it's own narrow , short term , short - term agenda with an obsession and greed for profit and preoccupation with share prices .

Richard Branson made £24 million profit in his 51 % stake in Virgin Trains , a 150 % rise in fares from Wales to London clearly contributed to that ! ? , the rest belongs to Stagecoach magnate Brian Soutar along with his sister Ann Gloag who have ammased an estimated £720 million fortune since bus deregulation in 1986 .

His fortune is well protected by transfers to overseas accounts and near monopolies in deprived areas with his bus company and it's constant fare rises .

A £500,000 donation to the Scottish National Party has ensured there is no renationalization of a Scottish railway system mired in bureaucracy , fragmentation and conflicting goals .

The present " Alice in Wonderland " privatized railway has five times more subsidy than British Rail in the height of the Thatcherite 1980 's boom , which was followed by the inevitable bust .

Hundreds of managers , regulators , specialist Railway lawyers , expensive consultants and armies of pen pushers are employed in backrooms to stop this dysfunctional , third -world railway from falling apart and to organize , argue over who pays for what and the inevitable blame culture of who is responsible for what .

The result is a hugely inefficent & expensive railway system that the Government has no real control over .

Network Rail ( the successor to the much maligned bankrupt Railtrack ) has a debt of £20 billion and the government has decreed that ticket prices should prices must rise so steeply that fare revenue in 2014 will be 80% higher than in 2007 .

A standard class return with Worst Great Western actually costs £158 , it's no wonder that the motorways are overcrowded and internal flights are so popular .

It is only classed as a private company to keep it's debt off Treasury books .

The problem is that there is no equivalent to a BR Board and no senior managers to provide leadership and these Whitehall idiots are desperately trying to fill the vacuum , the very same people that organized the disastrous new GNER and Worst Great Western franchises and to cap it all made such a bureaucratic mess of adding two more carriages to each Virgin Pendelino train .

Subsidy has doubled on the West Coast Mainline and Virgin's Sir Richard Branson absolutely took the Government to the cleaners. .
The overcrowded route has a maximum speed of 125 mph , but should have had 140 mph thanks to a basket case of a railway swallowing public funds and cock up upon cock up due to a ugly mix of conflicting commercial interests .

The West Coast mainline has the farcical situation of Trans Pennine Express running diesel 3 coach non tilting trains from Manchester to Glasgow on a mostly electrified route with passengers packed like sardines , there has been scenes akin to a Tokyo Underground in the rush hour .

National Express Cross Country runs four and sometimes five coach tilting trains that were the replacement for the older ex BR 7 & 8 coach trains on routes mostly unequipped for tilt .

Electric Trains are way ahead of the alternatives on carbon emissions and the companies running them are less exposed to the global oil market with prices rising .

The New Labour Government and it's Department for Transport ( Daft ) in London are also culpable , Neanderthal government planning is based on the prediction that oil will cost USD 20 to USD 50 a barrel from 2010 to 2020 ( it hit USD 122 recently and could climb to USD 200 ) .

Instead of hysteria ,& neurotic panic each time a train driver is too heavy on the throttle it would be better to reflect on how much more capacity the railway network would have today and how much cheaper the fares would have been , with more passengers using them instead of dubious statistics coming from Rail Minister Tom Harris parallel universe.

norbet1 has contributed a photo to this story.

To answer a lot of your questions, and I KNOW from experience of working with the railroad, a coasting train is quite dangerous. Brakes will NOT stop a train at coasting speeds. Engine downshifting is often used to help slow the train to where the brakes will hold. Derailments often happen due to a coasting train because the engine also provides the tension between the cars to keep them from hopping around. Also yes you do need power to operate the brakes because it's all air operated, and the engine needs to run to keep the air pressure up.

4 yrs of working with Union Pacific has taught me all this, so it's not like I'm guessing at all this.

I approved the use of my photos but feel forced to point out that they are not diesel trains. They are electric multiple units. These have always coasted downhill - and also recapture the energy they use for braking and return it to the system as electricity that can be used by other electric trains. In fact London's tube system was designed to slow down trains by having inclines into deep level tube stations and then declines out of them to help acceleration

To turn the engines on or off is not much trouble apart from the fact that you need to be stopped to switch the engine on.

Also- Would it not use more fuel to switch the engine on than have it in idle.

JZjr has contributed a photo to this story.

Makes sense to me.

An EWS Class 47 coasting through Winsford Cheshire.

whosoever2 has contributed a photo to this story.

This photo shows a HST125 at Platform 1at Gloucester. Gloucester has one of the longest platforms in the country. 1st Class coaches are right at the far end making the customers walk on an uncovered platfom approximately quarter mile to the exit. These trains are the last of the trains to have coaches without a noisy engin slung underneath them. In years to come we will look back on them as the last of luxury travel.

edgeworths2000 has contributed a photo to this story.