California Orders 29 Hydrogen Fuel Cells Trains for Intercity Services

Politicians are all too quick to jump into items they have only passing information. Jump into ideas without using their staff to really verify any proposal.

Canton OH bus company SARTA (Stark Area Regional Transit Agency) has had Hydrogen buses for 3 years now. It has its own filling station for 12 buses. Cost at last check was 4 dollars a gallon…BUT the Hydrogen Gas is manufactured in Toledo Ohio at a oil and gas refinery as a by product and trucked via tanker truck 120 miles to Canton OH from Toledo!!! Instead of using electralises to generate there own Hydrogen they are actually creating more of a carbon impact then if they just used dorsal or Natural GAs

Heere is hoping that all the problems of H2 production, transportation, storage, & use are solved. Otherwise it might be just a short time of usage. The problems that Shell oil could not solve with their closing of all California H2 stations does seem a reliability problem.

You can't "solve" the laws of a physics.

A boondoggle, plain and simple.

Shell just couldn't get the business to be worth it to sell hydrogen commercially because Shell needed people to buy hydrogen fueled cars, and people didn't (they suffered from a chicken and egg kind of problem that Tesla avoided by both selling cars and building recharging stations to jump start the battery electric car).

There are some significant advantages for hydrogen power over overhead electrics if you want to avoid diesel power:

• If using UP and BNSF property to run trains, CADOT doesn't have to work with those railroads to get electrification installed (depending on clearance requirements, installing electrification will first require lots of overhead structure replacement or regrading of rail lines and can get very expensive very fast) and CADOT can't compel those railroads to accept electrification.
• Environmental laws that allow citizens to protect their environments through lawsuits seem to now mostly be used in support of NIMBYism and BANANAism (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), so overhead electrification and any required supporting infrastructure like new hi-tension lines and substations can get locked up in courts leading to potential years of delay and cost overruns.
• NIMBYists and BANANAists can't object, on environmental grounds, to installing hydrogen fuel distribution in an existing rail maintenance facility that already has diesel fuel distribution.

Do you really think someone won't be able to use the phrase " hydrogen bombs rolling thru their towns" when this gets more widespread?....

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