Recently I visited the York National Railway Museum with my family. It’s a great day out, educational for the kids and very exciting for me. I like seeing the hulking great power of these massive machines that are now obsolete.
At the entrance to the main hall of the museum there is a 1949 steam locomotive that has been plasma cut in half. Every element of the engine has been cut away so that we can see inside.
The boiler had a huge gouge cut out exposing the forest of fine pipework. The pistons have been cut in half lengthways so you can see the cylinder and rods. The side of the cab has been cut off so you can see the myriad of levers and valves that would have operated the thing.
As my family and I stood and contemplated the vastness of this incredible machine, the sheer quantity of moving parts and the complexity of assembling everything I was struck with an almost tragic thought.
This fabulous Ellerman Lines steam engine that’s been unceremoniously (but beautifully) cut in half with a plasma axe represented the very height of steam technology in 1949 but is now nothing more than an interesting museum exhibit. In 1955 diesel locomotives came and revolutionised the railways. Not long after that were diesel electrics and eventually pure electrics. This amazing, giant and complex machine was absolutely useless compared to modern technology and was therefore withdrawn from service in 1966.
The last mainline steam engines disappeared from the UK’s railways in 1968. It look less than 15 years for the new technology to completely remove the old.
For almost two centuries before this incredible machine was built people worked very hard to improve the efficiency, the power and possibly the usability to make this the dominant technology. It took until 1955 for diesel (which had been worked on since around 1890) to supplant steam, at least on Britain’s railways.
I can imagine clever, industrious men in suits and hats working out stresses with slide rules or sitting in front of vast drafting tables, drawing out plans, making ever better increments, until one day a new technology came along and made all that work worthless.
There was nothing that even the cleverest men in suits and hats could do to make steam competitive with diesel.
To us it seemed ridiculously old fashioned to tow 5 tons of coal behind a train, and constantly shovel it in to the fire box to boil up some steam to make the thing run. The engine itself spewing smoke and steam from a multitude of orifices and dripping oil and making loud hissing noises. If you had never seen a steam engine before and you saw it next to a diesel it really would be ridiculous. One of them is definitely a great choice over the other.
I live near a railway line, one day one of my neighbours told me a steam engine would be running on the line and we should go to the bridge to watch. We went to the bridge and patiently waited until we saw it puffing and chugging it’s way towards us and under the bridge as we were showered with particles of soot. All very exciting and romantic if it’s once a year – but if that was the reality of railway travel it would get boring fast.
When I told my mother about watching the steam train she told me she hated them. Growing up in London in the 1950s she remembered how unpleasant the London air was, and how the steaming, screaming mass of hot spitting metal that spewed thick black smoke under the station canopy had scared her has a child. Culturally it’s easy to forget how much better new technology is when we romanticize the past.
My feeling is that we will tell our grandchildren about how cars used to contain a device that ran on explosive liquids that were stored in the car, and produced a lot of heat and would easily catch fire in accidents, and would spew choking fumes from things called “exhaust pipes”, and they will ask us incredulously “why didn’t you have electric cars?” and we will say that when they got good enough, we did replace them with electrics. And they will laugh at us the same way I laughed at my mother when she told me they used to be able to smoke in hospitals.
Perhaps our grandchildren will excitedly tell us about how they saw an ICE car today and we will say “I hate ICE cars – I remember when I was your age I would walk past some traffic lights. All of the ICE cars were queuing with their engines running, you could taste the acrid fumes in your mouth as you walked and you couldn’t avoid it. Electric is so much better” and they will look disappointed, so you tell them “In my day people used to smoke in restaurants!” and they will laugh at how stupid their grandparents generation was and go back into their virtual reality world.
Walking around the museum there were more locomotives, the beautiful steam powered Mallard engine (header image) that holds the world record for the fastest steam locomotive, again a ‘50s design. But all of these old steam engines were intermingled with newer, faster, sleeker and better locomotives. There was a British Rail Intercity 125, one of the first diesel electrics that was capable of pure electric propulsion from overhead lines. There was the faster and sleeker Intercity 225 that is primary used in pure electric mode in the UK.
Nearby there was the famously fast and sleek Japanese Bullet Train. Next to the bullet train was an information board showing all of the incremental improvements of bullet trains over the years.
And then it struck me. A gasoline or diesel powered car in 2018 is like the somewhat tragic cutaway steam engine from the entrance of the hall. However hard the engine designers work to improve the efficiency of the Internal Combustion Engine, their work is pointless compared to the obviously superior electric engine.
And the same trend is probably true as well, it has taken decades for electric to catch up to gasoline in the same way that it took the diesel railway locomotive a long time to be better than steam. There were lots of diesel locomotives before 1955, but the infrastructure and convenience weren’t there yet. Once they were though, steam died out very quickly indeed. Look around, electric charging points are popping up all over the place. Even in my sleepy town the supermarket has recently installed 4 electric charging points.
The electric car is quieter, nicer to drive, certainly more efficient and therefore less expensive to run and typically comes with a suite of clever sensors and more powerful onboard computers that make the experience of driving much better. Not so many years from now, they will make the experience of driving non-existent as automation creeps in and we all become passengers.
Coal, as a fuel for trains, didn’t die out overnight, but it did die out fairly quickly.
As coal depots up and down the railway lines began to close through lack of demand it made running steam engines harder. Probably more expensive too if they had to have larger tenders and lose a carriage. Diesel was obviously a better technology. It requires less maintenance, the diesel oil was easy to get and store, the engines were easier to operate and the torque was superior.
And so it will be for cars. Inconveniences will start creeping in for gasoline drivers as cities start to ban internal combustion engines, governments start to tax them more heavily for being polluting, the price of oil may go up as demand goes down as the large oil operators will start closing fields that are no longer financially viable. Gas stations will start closing pumps and replacing them with charging stations and eventually one will have to drive a long way to find a functioning gas station.
All of these inconveniences will conspire to end gasoline and diesel faster than people think. The sales of electric vehicles are rising exponentially, the tipping point is going to be the 50% mark of new car sales. Always be aware of 1% market share. The naysayers will point to 1% as being a tiny, pointless and easily dismissed number, but as Singularity University and Ray Kurzweil teaches us, 1% market share of a new technology is only 7 doublings from 100%. When electric car sales are increasing 50% year on year, it’s soon going to be 2% and not so many years to 100%.
As 50% of all new cars are electric only, older gasoline cars will start to disappear from the roads. Manufacturers will stop bothering to compete with the electric engine entirely and close their ICE divisions, and then the consumer will have no choice but to buy a new electric, and for the reasons above they will be happy to.
This will cause a sharp decline in gas stations and so on and so forth. When the slide starts to happen it will be faster than anyone thinks.
In the UK the oldest cars on the road are about 14 years old. So 14 years after the 50% of new cars being electric mark there will be almost no internal combustion engines left.
That doesn’t mean the end though – there are plenty of old steam locomotives and traction engines that are maintained by enthusiasts and brought out for special occasions. I still burn coal on my fire on very cold winter nights.
There will still be ICE cars on the roads, but they will be few and far between. My guess is that cars that are not interesting or notable will not be driven because of the social stigma and high running costs, but the classics and sportscars will remain.
I recently saw a Ford Model T delivery van in Copenhagen making it’s rounds. My guess is that the company that owns that van chooses to use it not because they had no choice and couldn’t buy a new van, but because it’s interesting and notable.
We will see the same thing with ICE cars, the occasional notable example among a world full of electric.
If I was a maker of steam boilers in 1955 I would have sold my company, pivoted or retired. I suggest that suppliers of ICE parts do the same – their days are numbered.
That’s the Unrelenting Optimist’s outlook anyway – let me know what you think in the comments
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