Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
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.

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

Have you ever seen the number of people 'local' trains shift round London?
Put all those in cars and there'd be total gridlock. Even before they
started looking for somewhere to park.

Sorry, I dint mean local in the sense of 'intra urban'. I meant in the
sense of rural.