Electric Drive Solution for Short Distance Passenger Railway Vehicles on Non-Electrified or Mixed Lines

The goal of this article is to find alternative solutions for diesel railway vehicles. An efficient and sustainable solution is to use batteries as an electric power source. In order to determine the required energy and therefore the capacity of these batteries, it is necessary to carry out a traction study to determine the optimal energy consumption as well as the maximum power recovered by the electric brake using the electric traction motors. The proposed solution involves charging batteries at the route terminus. The study in this paper is applied on a tram route in Bucharest where is considering that the trams travel on a non-electrified section which represents a third of the entire route. Although the study is carried out for a tram, the solution can be extended for a DMU (diesel multiple unit), converting it to a BEMU (battery electric multiple unit), intended to be used for passenger trains running on short-distances non-electrified lines, where the costs of introducing power systems through the catenary are not financially justified. In general, the proposed solution may be used on tourist lines, city lines that goes through the historical part of cities, or in metropolitan areas around major cities.