The only real connection to Tesla is that it's a Tesla-funded employee shuttle to a station on Tesla factory property. The trains are indeed Siemens Miero B and the line is operated by Niederbarnimer Eisenbahn.
I'd say that purchasing a train that runs (at least?) 3x per day and allowing the public to ride for free isn't nothing?
Definitely just a money + PR contribution though, I'd be curious of this is just advertising something that was a requirement from local lawmakers for building the factory in the first place.
The headline makes it sound like it's a Tesla-made train.
If it had been made by Tesla, they would have hyped it into the ground, tried to put it underground, and inspectors would notice a suspicious amount of hacks done just to keep it running. And Elon would have promised a self-driving mode that inexplicably doesn't work with a vehicle that only goes forward and backwards.
All I can find is that the new train replaces a diesel train, and that Tesla took flack last year for running a diesel-electric train as their employee shuttle.
Yes, the train is a Siemens Mireo, and I can't find anything that says that Tesla was involved in the development of this specific train at all... so Tesla provided branding, I guess.
What’s funny (or sad?) is seeing attacks on social media tearing down the idea of a battery powered train just because it is associated with Elon Musk.
Elon may be a shit person (though what billionaire isn’t a megalomaniac), and electric cars may be a poor long term solution for the environment (the spontaneous combustion and destructive mining of lithium are… less than desirable) but trains are cool, people should lay off them, in fact we need more of them.
Instead, let’s talk about what Elon promised would be better than trains: The χLoop (formerly Hyperloop).
Battery powered trains are a thing. Not all train tracks are electrified, even in Germany, and there are some places where a train line can be extended beyond an electrified segment. They charge through the normal overhead wire with about 1 MW with no extra provisions.
These are new-ish to a point where only train nerds know about them, but they're also old enough to be a fully certified COTS product that you can just buy the way that you buy your normal trains also.
Considering how fast that industry moves, I think that is saying something.
The fact that all train motors are electric (AFAIK) means that they are somewhat perfect targets for batteries and electrifying. Especially since once the train reaches cruising speed it requires remarkably little input energy. A big battery to absorb the stopping energy and move the train up to cruising speed makes a lot of sense. And it'd be easier/safer to electrify lines as you now just need overhead lines every n miles to keep the batteries charged vs having to line the entire rail with a 3rd rail. You could still have a diesel motor backup, but ultimately you could save tons on fuel costs as it wouldn't be responsible for powering the entire trip.
In more recent train nerd news, large scale regenerative battery electric trains are advancing from 'cute' to almost pulling some of the worlds longest and heaviest loads.
The 2022 announcemnt of Fortescue's Infinity Train for use in Western Australia's Pilbara region to "drop" iron ore loads from inland plateau heights to sea level over a 100 km or so have advanced to including a few early regen battery electric locomotives (From UK Williams Advanced Engineering) in their trains.
These are "trains" with five locomotives (two at either end and one in the middle) and a hundred+ rail cars each with a few hundred tonne of ore.
Current status is a single line item in current annual report citing purchases and research costs for "Progress on the decarbonisation of our rail operations".
To date no train has been fully battery electric, just running with the inclusion of some regen-battery-electric locos.
The train has to have an inverter anyways to vary its rpm, and I assume that the motor runs on less than 15 kV anyways. So it could conceivably be done without a separate DC-DC step-up converter, but I wouldn't know for sure.
Caltrain is getting something similar from Stadler.[1] They've ordered a trainset that can operate either on overhead wire power or battery power, so that
the train can run down to Gilroy, beyond the electrified zone. Charging is done while running on electrified track.
A bit of battery range beyond overhead wire isn't rare. SF's electric buses have that. The older models were stuck if they ever got off the wire. Newer ones can pull down the trolleys, drive to a spot under wire, and reconnect. It's a big help when something is blocking the street.
This is just bizarre - even the 20-ish year old trolley buses in Vancouver have backup batteries. They have enough charge to go maybe (maybe) six blocks, but they're also primarily used for vehicle maintenance, line maintenance, detours, and a just in case to make sure the bus will never get stuck on train tracks or similar
It amazed me when I learned this (from "Railroad Tycoon II"), that widespread, commercial use of electric trains counterintuitively predated the diesel era. Though the brushed electric motors they had pre-WW2 were very primitive and weak compared to today's.
They had no electric batteries worth speaking of, but it was all overhead wires, and labor was cheap; rolling out gigantic infrastructure projects was cheap.
It always blows people's minds in North Texas when I tell them there was electric train service from Dennison to Waco and Corsicana before automobiles were popular.
What's really crazy is I've told people this while in the park right outside the museum with one of the electric railroad cars and people still didn't have a clue despite being able to see the old railroad stop and living there a generation.
Since it is battery based, it can work on lines that don’t have overhead wiring, presumably. From the actual article behind the linked one (https://www.teslarati.com/teslas-all-electric-giga-train-in-...), it looks like this is effectively an employee shuttle:
> The Giga Train is Tesla’s answer to potential concerns that some employees might have had regarding how they would get to work. The new train will eventually transport 4,500 employees to the factory every single day, where they will build the company’s all-electric vehicles.
It is replacing a train that currently runs on diesel:
> Niederbarnimer Eisenbahngesellschaft, or NEB, is the train’s operator, and plans to switch to an e-fleet of trains starting at the end of this year. Managing director Sebastian Achtermann said:
> “We will put 31 battery-electric multiple units and seven hydrogen multiple units into operation, gradually replacing the diesel fleet we currently use.”
But if this is something they want to actually turn into a product instead of purchasing an existing battery based train, I could see Tesla learning from this experiment and then targeting geographies where there are lots of diesel based train lines without electrification.
Nothing novel about this specific bit of news. Tesla funds an employee shuttle rail service to a station at their factory. That service is now using battery-electric trains which are off the shelf models from Siemens.
Battery-electric passenger trains as an off-the-shelf option are a relatively new phenomenon, but not brand new or unique to this line or use case.
This appears to be a battery powered version of a diesel multiple unit type regional commuter rail train, notice the lack of overhead wiring for a catenary fed train system.
That’s also not novel. Here’s one from almost a century ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drumm_Battery_Train (it predates diesel locomotives as a common thing; it was primarily competing with steam engines).
Not really novel here. Tesla funds this employee shuttle route to their factory and it is now using off-the-shelf Siemens Miero B battery-electric trains.
It's a nice service to provide, and nice that the electric car factory is served by an electric train, but Tesla isn't launching any new product or technology here.
Trains with batteries might make sense in USA, but it is extremely weird to see one in Europe, where electrified rails are ubiquitous and they do not have the disadvantage of batteries that must be charged and which have a limited lifetime.
The "Giga train" is an off-the-shelf battery electric train that Siemens already produces. Tesla just funded their use on this shuttle line for employees of their factory.
Batteries are cool PR, but wouldn't it be better for a train to not have to accelerate all the mass of the batteries, and just use wires overhead to deliver power?
I almost bored you with technical details I will refrain, but basically, you want your train to be able to continue if you have a third rail/overhead failure. Look up TGV-M if you want more information.
"just" run high powered wires with enough energy to move an entire train for the entire length of the track? and deal with having a coupling system to the train? obviously since it's been done it's feasible, but I think you're discounting how much work that is to build and maintain.
I'm not sure what's more resilient, if a tree falls on to the tracks breaking the electrified wire, it'd also be on the rails, stopping the train anyway, but I imagine not having an electrified wired dangling around across the country is less dangerous than having a battery in a known location with qualified engineers looking after it.
They could just be doing this for PR purposes, but I'd love to see the internal cost analysis that was done to build this vs the cost of building using a known good solution.
> “just" run high powered wires with enough energy to move an entire train for the entire length of the track?
This has been done successfully around the world since the 1880s. Looking at a map it seems like the length of the line is only a few miles, so doesn’t seem like it would be that huge of an electrification project, especially considering Germany’s rails are already 55% electrified.
> "We are particularly pleased that the Tesla train shuttle is now battery-electric because it is simply in line with our company mission: to accelerate the transition to renewable energies," Theresa Eggler, a project manager at Tesla, told German media outlet rbb24.
I did find it amusing a few years ago when I saw a Tesla service vehicle: it was a standard ICE Ford Transit cargo van. (this was before they came out with the EV version of that model)
Tesla sells pollution credits to their competitors to delay their EV programs and harm the planet. They completely negate any environmental benefit to buying a Tesla, since the purchase just lets some other manufacturer sell one more dirty SUV. Tesla's mission statement, like all things Musk, is self-serving propaganda.
A program which increases the price of Chrysler ICE vehicles and decreases the price of Tesla EV's is bad for the planet?
Note that the alternative to Chrysler paying Tesla is Chrysler paying a fine to the government. If they chose the alternative then only one half of the above statement would be true.
> They completely negate any environmental benefit to buying a Tesla, since the purchase just lets some other manufacturer sell one more dirty SUV.
That isn't how that works. If each carmaker is required to sell 20% EVs (or whatever) and then Tesla sells 100% EVs and Chrysler sells 0%, the overall average is still at least 20% and you're still buying an EV. It's not any less "buying an EV" than it would be to buy a Chrysler EV which also allows Chrysler to sell more ICE SUVs. Moreover, the number is the lower limit -- if Tesla sells 100% EVs and Chrysler sells 0% and they each sell the same number of vehicles, you'd then have 50% EVs even if the law only required 20%.
A map[1] - Erkner to "Fangschleuse, Tesla Süd Bhf". The station is still under construction on Google/Bing[2] airphotos, older on Mapquest/Here, forest on Yandex, nothing on Baidu. Googling "Fangschleuse, Tesla Süd Bhf"[3] has a nice set of pictures in the sidebar, which I don't see a way to link to?
There is some benefit to having a single large scale power plant vs many small engines/generators - a large turbine that runs relatively constantly can be made far more efficient than a smaller diesel generator that spins up and down regularly. It also allows electrification of down the line outputs, which instantly get the benefit from replacing the coal plant with something more efficient when German lawmakers finally wake up and get their act together.
the right way to solve this problem is to start building nuclear. And to throw to jail previous crop of German politicians who sold out its energy independence to russia and fossil fuel lobby
> The X-12's unique reactor would be a six-sided, double-walled vessel of stainless steel, only three feet high and wide and one foot thick. Inside it would be 64 gallons of "soup" — uranyl sulfate (a yellowish compound of uranium) dissolved in water. The 20 pounds of uranium in the uranyl sulfate would mostly be of the fissionable U-235 variety.
> How would passengers, crew, even people standing on station platforms be protected from the deadly rays generated in the core? Most reactors have tremendous concrete walls surrounding them, but such a shield could not possibly be squeezed onto a locomotive frame. The X-12 shielding would weigh 200 tons, measure 10 by 15 by 15 feet, and be four feet thick. It would consist of several steel tanks nestling one inside another. The steel would stop the X-ray-like gamma radiation. To confine neutrons, the spaces between steel tanks would be filled with hydrogen-rich material like water, paraffin, or plastic.
> The big gain from atomic fuel, as Dr. Borst sees it, is likely to be an economic one. Despite the high cost of an engine like the X-12 — around $1,200,000, twice the price of a comparable diesel — its almost negligible fuel requirement (eleven pounds of uranium per year) could make it cheap to operate. This would be particularly true if it could be kept in operation nearly continuously, pulling high-speed expresses over long hauls and wasting little time turning around for the return trip. And in due course, the comparatively high cost of making these engines would likely be reduced as the actual problems of design, manufacture, and operation were further researched.
The train looks like an existing battery-powered Siemens Mireo:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Mireo#Mireo_Plus_B