How Electric Rail Could Be More Important Than Electric Cars

Sergio Alberto Romero, Ed.D.
3 min readFeb 7, 2022

Choo-Choo!

Photo by eberhard 🖐 grossgasteiger on Unsplash

Electric cars are going to be important over the long term, that’s without a doubt. The fact is, no matter what industry or sector we’re talking about the less reliance we have on fossil fuels the better so I’m certainly not advising you to go out and buy another internal combustion engine vehicle because that’s simply not the right move anymore. However, I am suggesting that electrifying railways could be even more important than simply electrifying automobiles, let’s check out why that is!

Diesel

Long story short: The majority of locomotives used throughout the United States, especially for commercial purposes such as shipping rely on diesel fuel. What is one of the most CO2 intensive fuels on the market today? If you said diesel, you are correct. While there has been a lot of debate over the years as to whether diesel or petroleum-based fuels had higher emissions it seems that diesel is still a lot more damaging to the environment than petrol is. Especially once we start to take into consideration the amount of maintenance needed to keep diesel engines running at optimal efficiency. While there are certainly diesel cars on the road, it’s easy to see that the majority of diesel being used as fuel is coming from the locomotive industry since the majority of their trains use…

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Sergio Alberto Romero, Ed.D.

The elements compose a magnum opus. My modus operandi is amalgam.