Electric traction – the pioneers
5BEL Trust
Factsheet 1
Factsheet 1 looks at the early pioneers of electric traction and the gradual replacement of horse drawn urban transit systems by electrically powered trams and trains.
Factsheet 1: Electric traction – the pioneers The first known electric locomotive was built by Robert Davidson of Aberdeen in 1837 and was powered by galvanic cells or batteries. In 1841 he exhibited a larger locomotive named Galvani at the Royal Scottish Society of Arts Exhibition; when this was tested on the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway in September 1842, it was clear that the limited electric power available from the batteries rendered it impractical for operational use. The world’s first electric passenger train was demonstrated by Werner von Siemens at Berlin’s trade exhibition of 1879. Powered by a 2.2 kW motor the train, consisting of the locomotive and three cars, reached a maximum speed of 13 km/h (8 mph). Over a four month period the train carried a total of 90,000 passengers on a 300 meter long circular track; some lay down on the tracks to get a feel for the invisible power that propelled the "train that has no steam or horses." The electricity was supplied through a third isolated rail situated between the tracks and a stationary dynamo nearby provided the electricity. Progress to convert transit systems to electricity was gradual. The conversion was simplest for urban transit systems, most of which were using horse‐drawn streetcars in the final quarter of the 19th century, leading to serious issues of public hygiene, despite regular street cleaning. Werner von Siemens built the world's first electric tram line, which opened in Lichterfelde near Berlin, Germany, in 1881. In 1883, a narrow gauge railway that runs along a length of the seafront of the English seaside resort of Brighton was built by Magnus Volk and is the oldest operating electric railway in the world. It runs between terminal stations at Aquarium, a short distance from the Palace Pier, and Black Rock, near to the Brighton Marina, with an intermediate station and depot at Paston Place. The 2km (1.25 miles) line has a gauge of 825 mm (2 ft 81⁄2 in) and is electrified at 110 V DC using a third rail. The initial 1883 line was intended as a temporary summer attraction, with 50V DC supplied to the cars using the two running rails. In 1884 the line was extended and the electrical supply increased to 160 V DC. In 1886 a third rail was added to avoid power loss along the extended line. The voltage was reduced to the present 110 V in the 1980s. In the US, electric trolleys were pioneered in 1888 on the Richmond Union Passenger Railway, using equipment designed by Frank J. Sprague; a former Naval Officer, he contributed to the development of the electric motor and electric elevators, as well as electric railways. During 1883 he corrected Thomas Edison's system of mains and feeders for central station distribution and introduced Edison to advanced mathematical methods at his Menlo Park Laboratory. In 1884, he left Edison to found the Sprague Electric Railway & Motor Company. By 1886, his company had introduced two important inventions: a constant‐speed, non‐sparking motor with fixed brushes, and a method to return power to the main supply systems of equipment driven by electric motors. His new motor was the first to maintain constant revolutions per minute under different loads and was endorsed by Edison as the only practical electric motor available. Sprague's inventions included a system on streetcars for collecting electricity from overhead wires. In late 1887 and early 1888, using his spring‐loaded trolley pole system, Sprague installed the first 2 Brighton Belle Factsheet | Electric traction – the pioneers
successful large electric street railway system, the Richmond Union Passenger Railway in Richmond, Virginia. Long a transportation obstacle, the hills of Richmond included grades of over ten per cent, and were an excellent proving ground for acceptance of his new technology in other cities. By 1889, one hundred and ten electric railways incorporating Sprague's equipment had been started or planned on several continents; Edison, who manufactured most of Sprague's equipment, bought the company in 1890 and Sprague turned his attention to electric elevators. Much of the early development of electric locomotion was driven by the increasing use of tunnels, particularly in urban areas. Smoke from steam locomotives was noxious, and municipalities were increasingly inclined to prohibit their use within their limits. Thus the first successful working, the City and South London Railway underground line, now part of the London Underground Northern Line, was prompted by a clause in its enabling act prohibiting use of steam power. This line opened in 1890, using electric locomotives built by Mather and Platt. It was followed in 1898 by the Waterloo & City Line. Electricity quickly became the power supply of choice for subways, abetted by the Sprague's invention of multiple‐unit train control in 1897. Surface and elevated rapid transit systems generally used steam until forced to convert by ordinance. In 1894, the Hungarian engineer Kálmán Kandó developed high‐voltage three phase alternating current motors and generators for electric locomotives; he is known as "the father of the electric train". Working at the Ganz electric works in Budapest, he was the first to recognise that an electric train system could only be successful if it could use electricity sourced from public networks. He created the means to build such a rail network by inventing a rotary phase converter suitable for locomotive usage. The first use of electrification on a mainline was on a 6.5 km (4 miles) stretch of the Baltimore Belt Line of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) in 1895. This track connected the main portion of the B&O to the newly built line to New York, requiring a series of tunnels around the edges of Baltimore's downtown. Parallel tracks on the Pennsylvania Railroad had shown that coal smoke from steam locomotives would be a major operating issue, as well as a public nuisance. Three Bo+Bo units were initially used, at the south end of the electrified section; they coupled onto the entire train, locomotive and all, and pulled it through the tunnels. In Europe, electrification projects initially focused on mountainous regions for several reasons: coal supplies were difficult, whereas hydroelectric power was readily available and electric locomotives gave more traction on steeper lines. This is why, by way of example, all of the Swiss railway network is electrified. Railroad entrances to New York City required similar tunnels, and the smoke problems were especially acute. A collision in the Park Avenue tunnel in 1902 led the New York State legislature to outlaw the use of smoke‐generating locomotives south of the Harlem River after July 1, 1908. In response, electric locomotives began operation in 1904 on the New York Central Railroad. In the 1930s the Pennsylvania Railroad, which also had introduced electric locomotives because of the NYC regulation, electrified its entire territory east of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Italian railways were the first in the world to introduce electric traction (designed by Kálmán Kandó at the Ganz electric works, Budapest) for the entire length of a mainline, rather than just a short stretch. During the period of electrification, some tests were made as to which type of power supply to use: in some sections there was a 3.6kV 16.6Hz three‐phase power supply, in others there were 1.5kVdc, 3kVdc and 10kVac 50Hz supplies. Eventually, the entire Italian railway system standardised on a 3kVdc power supply ‐ today we see 1.5kVdc only in use near France; 25kV 50Hz is used on high speed trains, and the rest of the system uses 3kVdc). 3 Brighton Belle Factsheet | Electric traction – the pioneers
In the United States, the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad (the ‘Milwaukee Road’) ‐ the last transcontinental line to be built ‐ electrified its lines across the Rocky Mountains and to the Pacific Ocean starting in 1915. A few East Coast lines, notably the Virginian Railway and the Norfolk and Western Railway, found it expedient to electrify short sections of their mountain crossings. However, by this point, electrification in the United States was more associated with dense urban traffic, and the center of development shifted to Europe, where electrification was widespread. In 1923, the first electric locomotive with a phase converter was constructed on the basis of Kandó’s designs in Hungary, and serial production began soon after. The section of the Hungarian State Railways between Budapest ‐ Hegyeshalom ‐ Vienna (1929) was built based on Kandó’s invention. The 1960s saw the electrification of many European main lines, including those of Eastern Europe, with European electric locomotive technology improved steadily from the 1920s onwards. By way of comparison, the Milwaukee Road class EP‐2 (1918) weighed 240 t, with a power of 3,330 kW and a maximum speed of 112 km/h (70 mph); in 1935, the German E 18 had a power of 2,800 kW, but weighed only 108 tons and had a maximum speed of 150 km/h (93 mph). In 1955, French locomotive CC 7107 established a speed of 331 km/h (206 mph). In 1960 the SJ Class Dm 3 locomotives introduced on the Swedish Railways produced a record 7,200 kW. Locomotives capable of commercial passenger service at 200 km/h (124 mph) appeared in Germany and France in the same period. Further improvements resulted from the introduction of electronic control systems, which allowed the adoption of increasingly lighter and more powerful motors ‐ from the 1990s onwards, the standard was an asynchronous three‐phase motor, fed through GTO‐inverters. In the United States, the use of electric locomotives declined in the face of dieselization. Diesels shared some of the electric locomotive’s advantages over steam; the very high cost of building and maintaining the power supply infrastructure, which had always worked to discourage new installations, brought on the elimination of most mainline electrification outside the Northeast. Except for a few captive systems ‐ e.g. the Black Mesa and Lake Powell ‐ by 2000, electrification was confined to the Northeast Corridor and some commuter service. Even there, freight service was handled by diesels. In the 1980s, development of very high‐speed service brought a revival of electrification. The Japanese Shinkansen and the French TGV were the first systems for which dedicated high‐speed lines were built from scratch. Similar programs were undertaken in Italy, Germany and Spain; in the United States the only new mainline service was an extension of electrification over the Northeast Corridor from New Haven, Connecticut to Boston, Massachusetts, although new light rail systems using electrically powered cars continued to be built. In 2006 a standard production Siemens Electric locomotive of the Eurosprinter type ES64‐U4 (ÖBB Class 1216) achieved a record speed of 357 km/h (222 mph) for a locomotive‐hauled train on the new line between Ingolstadt and Nuremberg. The record lasted for less than a year. In 2007, a French TGV train achieved 574.8 km/h (356 mph) using a modified Alsthom built unit with larger wheels than standard and two engines hauling just three cars; the voltage was temporarily increased from 25kV to 31kV. The absolute train speed record was set by a Japanese magnetic levitation train ‐ Maglev ‐ in 2003. It reached a top speed of 581km/h (361mph). 4 Brighton Belle Factsheet | Electric traction – the pioneers