Climate Solutions: Rail

Four years after embarking on a two-year operational trial run in Germany, a bunch of Coradia iLint hydrogen fuel-cell trains have entered passenger service along a 100% hydrogen route in Lower Saxony.

Diesel-electric locomotives can be easily converted to battery-electric, says a new paper in Nature Energy, at a 20-year cost that can beat parity if emissions costs are taken into account. And there will be other benefits, notably for the power grid.

Rail technology company Wabtec has demonstrated a new form of electric train technology that could help lessen the environmental footprint of heavy-haul freight services, reducing fuel consumption of an entire train by 11 percent in an early pilot.

In a landmark moment for the experimental transportation technology, Virgin Hyperloop has welcomed aboard its first ever passengers, albeit only for a short spin along a test track that reached speeds of 107 mph (172 km/h).

Michael Fragomeni is sitting on the threshold of plugging in an electric motor design that, despite modest dimensions, can thrust a hyperloop pod from rest to 155 mph in a fraction of a second.

The first solar farm to provide power to a railway line in the UK was switched on today by Riding Sunbeams, 10:10, Community Energy South and Network Rail.

SpaceX’s Hyperloop Pod competition continues to bring out the very best in student engineering teams from all around the world. The reigning champions from the Technical University of Munich have returned this year to fend off their challengers, setting a new speed record in the process. ​

​​Exactly five years after its founding, startup HyperloopTT is keen to show off the progress that it has made by revealing its very first full-scale passenger pod. The sleek and futuristic capsule will apparently be ready to roll in a commercial sense sometime in 2019.

The world's first hydrogen fuel cell-powered train has entered regular service in Germany with a two-car Alstom Coradia iLint taking to the tracks on Eisenbahnen und Verkehrsbetriebe Elbe-Weser's (EVB) Elbe-Weser network in Lower Saxony.

​The people-moving potential of a Hyperloop rightly generates a lot of the buzz, we are talking about fizzing people through low-vacuum tubes at around the speed of sound. But what about its capacity to moves goods with new levels of efficiency?

Those visiting the northern New South Wales coastline will have the chance to ride on new sustainably powered transport service. The Byron Bay Railroad Company is setting the wheels in motion for what it calls the world's first solar-powered train, whose roots can be traced back to World War II.

The 600,000 Dutch that travel daily by train will now do so thanks purely to wind energy, with the national rail operator Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) announcing that 100 percent of its passenger trains will be powered by the renewable source from January onwards.