"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...

It was pretty graphic way to remind us WHY coal powered steamers were
ditched. Frequent stops for water mandatory, unless you count the water
troughs systems..unreliable and needed very frequent servicing, and a
filthy dirty backbreaking job to stoke them.

All of which could be fixed if someone wanted to.
A fluidised bed fire with auto feed would work fine.
Water requires more thought but why couldn't it be condensed and reused?
Preheating the water being boiled would save fuel and save water.
There just wasn't any reason to do it before steam was dumped so it was
never done.


I rad somewhere recently that even modern electric trains are ot very
carbon efficient: the trains are, but the amount of track servicing
signalling and so on is a huge overhead of goods materials and people that
need to be shipped around to keep it all going.

It depends on where they get the electricity.
If its from nuclear they are quite carbon efficient, maybe even as good as
cars.


It really is an argument for doing away with all local services and using
them as high speed intracontinental links.