Very Light Rail for Victoria?

On CHEK News this afternoon was a rather long piece on Ultra light rail for Victoria and Zwei sees a problem.

What was being pitched was an Ultra Light Rail system and not the Very light rail system, being proposed for Coventry, though using photos of Coventry’s Very Light Rail proposal.

When a promoter of certain transit mode doesn’t know the name of the transit system, he/she is promoting, Zwei gets very worried.

Ultra light rail system,  is a different proprietary transit system altogether and I hope this is just a translation issue because Very light rail uses small trams, while Ultra light rail uses bus like vehicles and has some off-track capabilities, which puts it into the gadgetbahnen category.

Very light rail is basically smaller trams, operating on lighter track, which would make for cheaper installations in urban centres.

Very light rail evolved from the earlier  Parry People Mover, which used stored energy kinetic/flywheel technology to a power the tram. Very Light Rail uses quick charging batteries for operation, thus no need for electrical overhead, just a few strategically located charging stations.

There were hints it would operate on the E&N, but that won’t happen, but using the Galloping Goose Trail is another story.

Of course that will excite the cycle lobby, what fun!

Building an European style tramway would probably be a much safer investment, but politicians just love spending money on  media pleasing projects and not what is good for the transit customer and taxpayer.

Zwei will wait and see what transpires and with an election looming, who knows.

 

Very Light Rail Vehical

Very Light Rail Vehicle

 

The first vehicle in Coventry | © Coventry City Council

In London, Birmingham and Manchester, urban rail projects have encouraged thousands to take zero emission journeys instead of jumping in the car. But for many cities, urban rail is simply not an option – the costs are too high, the streets too narrow, and existing infrastructure presents too costly a barrier to remove.

Coventry is building something different; a new urban rail system which could allow other similarly sized cities and towns to benefit from urban light rail.

Dubbed Coventry Very Light Rail (VLR), Coventry City Council is working with researchers and engineers from WMG at the University of Warwick, to develop a new kind of vehicle, alongside a new track, to enhance the business case for urban light rail in places like Coventry.

The vehicle

The new vehicle, pictured, differs significantly from trams and is about the same size as a single decker bus, having roughly the same capacity – 56. It’s designed to have a 15m turning circle, meaning it can get round the tight corners in Coventry’s roads. It’s battery powered, meaning it’s locally zero emission and doesn’t need overhead cabling. Recharging is done via pantograph at Furry&Frey fast cargers along the future line. And by making use of lightweight materials, it puts less pressure on the road, enabling the design of an entirely new kind of track.

Charging station by Furrer+Frey | © Coventry City Council / WMG
 
The track

The track is where the significant cost savings come in. Sitting beneath today’s roads is a crisscross of utilities – gas, water, internet – which can be extremely costly to relocate. This means traditional urban rail can cost anywhere between £25m and £50m per kilometre – with £100m not unheard of in some city centre locations.

The new track, designed from scratch in partnership with WMG and Ingerop, will sit just 30cm into a road surface, minimising the need to move utilities. As a result, Coventry City Council estimates the new track could cost closer to £10m per kilometre to install.

“The track is really what brings this project together”, says Darren Hughes, Associate Professor at WMG, University of Warwick. “In addition to savings made by removing the need to divert utilities, we expect the track’s shallow nature to speed up installation, too. It is envisaged that sections of the new Coventry Very Light Rail track could be completed within a few weeks rather than months as is typically needed when installing conventional track in complex city environments.”

The first use case

While work is ongoing on proposed first route, it has been confirmed that it will connect the city centre and railway station with University Hospital Coventry & Warwickshire. Future routes will focus on areas likely to see high uptake of the system.

The Coventry VLR vehicle has been exhibited on different places and will shortly move from Coventry to the VLR National Innovation Centre in Dudley, the UK’s first site dedicated to VLR technology, to undergo extensive testing. By 2024, the Council hopes to have installed a city demonstrator route in the city centre, to showcase the technology to other local authorities, with the first full route expected to be complete in 2026.

Public opinion

Councillor Jim O’Boyle, cabinet member for jobs, regeneration and climate change at Coventry City Council and board director at Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership (CWLEP), explains: “As a city, it’s important for us to provide people with a number of attractive, affordable and green options to encourage a shift to public transport, both in an effort to fight climate change, and also to address air quality.

“I’m extremely excited about our Coventry Very Light Rail project, we’re taking advantage of a unique opportunity and it’s one that could transform public transport.  Our city led the transport revolution, and we have some of the best engineers in the world working to improve public transport and tackle climate change. With Coventry VLR we’re building a unique mode of transport with the potential to make cities and towns across the UK even greener and more interconnected.

“Coventry Very Light Rail is just one of our world-beating transport projects. From micromobility, electric vehicle manufacturing, vehicle charge points or our proposed Gigafactory, Coventry is leading the green industrial revolution.”

Councillor Simon Phipps, cabinet member for regeneration and enterprise at Dudley Council, said: “Dudley Council is working closely with BCIMO and Coventry to drive this fantastic project forward and we are incredibly excited about the Coventry VLR vehicle coming to Dudley. This project is one of a number of exciting rail programmes taking shape and it puts Dudley a step closer to becoming a global leader in rail innovation and greener transport solutions.”

The project is part of the West Midlands Combined Authority’s City Regional Sustainable Transport Fund bid, and is expected to be awarded at £54.9m. The project has also received funding from the Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership and the Council itself.

Details of the vehicle | © Coventry City Council / WMG
© Warwick University
• Render of VLR National Innovation Centre, where vehicle will be going for testing shortly | © Coventry Cit

Comments

5 Responses to “Very Light Rail for Victoria?”
  1. Haveacow says:

    I’m glad you got the article I saw it and was going to send you the link but I got sidetracked. My ex-wife had to have her appendix removed on Monday due to a massive attack on Sunday. She came home yesterday everything is ok, although she’s still in quite a bit of pain.

  2. Haveacow says:

    Although this technology has potential, I wonder how much it’s really going to save. Battery technology is a very expensive and a notoriously finicky as well as a low performance technology, considering the cost of it.

    Like battery powered buses, I believe the technology is still way too underdeveloped for use on buses or trains. Battery overheating /fire issues aside, a simple clean diesel unit I think would be better initially. However, the cost and charging time problems of battery electric vehicles, still plague these vehicles. 3rd-Rail and electric overhead catenary wire may be more expensive but they are able to move much, much larger quantities of electrical current at any given voltage into electric motors compared to batteries.

    For example, you have to buy 30%-40% more battery electric buses compared to standard diesel buses because even the quickest charging technology means 30% – 40% of your fleet is charging or requiring more maintenance and are unavailable for service.

    Battery electric vehicles not only cost considerably more than the current diesel equivalents, the lack of an exterior power supply which can constantly dump higher electrical current levels into a motor compared to a battery, meaning the flow or current in battery electric vehicles is much lower. Thus, translating to lower horsepower equivalent for battery electric vehicles. If you want more pulling power for the vehicle you have to drastically lower the operating range of the battery. This and other issues have been problems for decades with battery electric vehicles and they really have yet to be solved.

  3. Yukon says:

    This might work on the short track from Olympic village station and Granville Island as a shuttle service. There is already overhead power lines installed for the Olympic. A regular LRT would be good enough.

    Ottawa LRT is having problems again and shut down.

    Zwei replies: The problems in Ottawa can be traced to the P-3 maintenance contract where the concessionaires of the P-3 did not hire experienced staff to do maintenance. The bearing’s issue seems to highlight not a train issue, but a maintenance issue. I have been told, that maintenance P-3’s are not uncommon and the standard practice is to hire people who have expertise in maintaining the vehicles in operation, which given the scope of the P-3, the concessionaires run at a loss for 2 or 3 years, learning the ins and outs of the vehicles being maintained. In Ottawa this did not happen as the P-3 concessionaire wanted instant profits at day one and has been doing improper maintenance since opening with disastrous results. Please remember the derailment which lead to the inquiry was caused by a transmission improperly torqued onto the motor, which fell off causing the derailment.

  4. Haveacow says:

    We’re finally getting to the root cause of many but not all of the issues with the trains (Alstom Citadis Sprit’s). It seems the wheel/axle hubs and bearings are simply not up to the task given. The LRV’s are heavier than their European brethren because of the North America pathological need for all our LRV’s to have a higher crash worthiness. The greatly increased spin of the smaller wheels designed for low floor trams and LRV’s driven along by more powerful motors (due to the heavier North American weighted trains) than there European versions, thus the much greater weight, spin and wear on the axles, wheelhubs and bearings. These more powerful motors produce greater torque at lower rpm’s. However, the multiple start-stop action introduces higher levels of stress and torque fluctuations on the drive train. A loaded Citadis Spirit vehicle has a per axle load,@ from 15% to 20% higher than its European cousins. Couple the high load with smaller wheels, which cause higher rotational speed – especially at Ottawa’s higher speeds, and it is suspected that the installed wheel-bearings are simply not up to the task.

    Complicated by RTG’s & RTM (Rideau Transit Group & Rideau Transit Maintenance) need to not want to spend anything extra or at all, on maintenance. After the 2021 derailment the TSB ordered RTM to increase spending greatly on new axles and bearings wheel hubs, while a root cause was being researched. They did very begrudgingly.

    The new head of O.C. Transpo, Mme. Amilcar took a chance on this shutting down the line this time. She knows that it will be unpopular with riders, but I don’t think that she was willing to inflict anymore future uncertainty on riders. Without a stick, in the form of bad press, Alstom, just wasn’t doing anything to solve the ongoing wheel hub axle wear problems. Since the shut-down, and resulting bad media reports, test trains with instrumented bogies suddenly started running the rails. A week later, Alstom has agreed to redesign the hub and wheel-bearing. And Mme. Amilcar declared that to the press, immediately, just so that Alstom couldn’t back out.

  5. zweisystem says:

    I have been told by an American chap, that the reason for the “pathological” demand for higher crash worthiness for North American LRV’s was due in part by the pathological (my add on) anti-tram that planners in the USA have for European type trams. Many American planners still plan for the days of PCC cars and trolley poles and remain quite (to be polite) out of touch with modern design and new materials like carbon fibre and “crush/crumple” points on trams if they do have an accident. Of course Transport Canada mimic everything that the FRA does and we remain deeply in-bedded by 1960’s planning.

    One of the reasons for this was light-metro, which made the engineering firms (and politcal contributions) made good profit on from generous over-engineering of transit projects. Vancouver’s SkyTrain light metro system is case in point, with Montreal’s REM another victim of gross over engineering.

    The other anti-rail item that planners use is level crossings and the penchant of transit planners having trams literally crawl across of level crossing, which is protected by lights, bells, and a gate, yet just a few blocks away major roads and highways cross streets (in fact a level crossing) at speeds as high as 80 to 90 kph and are protected by a light only or just sighns. The recent tragic bus accident on the prairies with saw many deaths was cause by a bus crossing a 4 lane divided highway which had no lights or signs on the highway to warn of a crossing.

    The hypocrisy is absolutely stunning.

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