Electricity is taking over the transportation sector, with batteries replacing fossil-fuel engines in a growing number of passenger cars, big-rig trucks, school buses, delivery vans, speedboats and ferries. Yet one category in particular is only just starting to get on board with battery power: freight trains.
In the United States, tens of thousands of locomotives rumble down railroads every year, pulling cars that collectively carry around 20 billion tons of cargo. All of these powerful engines run on diesel fuel — and, as a result, generate both planet-warming emissions and harmful air pollution that afflicts communities surrounding rail yards and railways.
This week, Wabtec Corp., a rail technology company, took what it says is a ​“major step” toward electrifying this heavy-duty industry.
At a ceremony in Erie, Pennsylvania, Wabtec unveiled the world’s first battery-powered, heavy-haul locomotive that will be used for mainline service. The hulking vehicle has a battery capacity of 7 megawatt-hours, or roughly the same capacity as 100 Tesla Model Ys, the country’s best-selling electric vehicle.
“We’ve been working on this technology for decades,” Alan Hamilton, Wabtec’s vice president of engineering, told Canary Media ahead of the October 31 event. ​“But only in the past five years or so has energy storage technology gotten to the point that you can start to think about how to practically deploy this.”
If widely adopted, battery-electric trains could slash the U.S. industry’s annual carbon dioxide emissions by more than half, while also avoiding roughly $6.5 billion in yearly health costs linked to air pollution, according to a 2021 study by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California, Berkeley, and UCLA.