[Effective Transit Alliance] ETA just published a report on New York rolling stock costs for commuter rail. In the report, we talk about the need to electrify the entire system, and, if there are unelectrified tails (which there shouldn’t be), the solution for them is not more diesel locomotives. For the purposes of this post, I’d instead like to talk about the difficulties of getting some of this information; the rolling stock database that we have at the Transit Costs Project is growing, but is far from complete, and has gaps, with some information including cost missing for critical orders. What I think from the available data is that alternatives to electrification are far more expensive – the one with the most reliable cost data, battery-electric trains (BEMUs), costs close to 2.5 times as much, while dual-mode diesel-electric multiple units (DEMUs) cost less than BEMUs and more than regular electric multiple units (EMUs). But this is based on imperfect data and I’d like to discuss this issue more.
To the point on EMU costs: something is seriously screwed up with some of the orders. There’s that diva effect for large cities that I’ve talked about for years, in which large cities with old systems prefer to buy custom designs, for example the X’Trapolis in Paris, or the Berlin U- and S-Bahn orders. These are the largest orders, so the average cost Europe-wide is pulled up by these cases. In contrast, standard regional EMU orders are more routine and cheaper; two recent FLIRT orders, for Hanover and Bremen, were respectively $110,000/meter of length and $104,000/meter. But even then, there are variations, and Coradia Stream orders vary by a factor of about 2, for reasons that I don’t quite get.
Then BEMUs are not ordered in a large quantity, but when they are, the costs appear high – the database has a $249,000/m order by ÖBB; there’s an even more expensive order for NAH.SH, both FLIRT Akkus. Another fairly large order, for Pfalznetz, does not have cost data anywhere that I can see; Stadler is putting up a technical sheet for it, but not for ÖBB, but then whenever I look up costs for the Pfalznetz Akku I only get the NAH.SH one and I don’t know why.