Are only one-third of Britain’s railways electric?

Which countries are the leaders and laggards on rail electrification, and why should we care?

Over the last few years, I’ve seen numerous graphics and social media posts similar to the ones below. They show what share of different countries’ railway lines are electrified. Most of the rest run on diesel.

The focus of the post is always one of a few things. First, surprise that India has almost fully electrified its rail networks, putting most of the rest of the world to shame. Second, the fact that basically none of America’s railways are electrified. Or three, the mediocre performance of countries like the UK especially compared to their European neighbours.

But there are also a few things about that statistics that initially seem confusing. As someone that spends a lot of time on trains in the UK (I am actually writing this on one), the fact that just over one-third of the lines are electrified seems odd to me. I barely remember being on one that wasn’t. Japan, who we hold up as the pinnacle of modern, high-speed rail seems like it should do better.

So I took a bit of time to figure out if these numbers are actually believable and why some of them seem to be at-odds with what many people will experience day-to-day.

First, are the numbers in these viral infographics and tweets correct?

Pretty much. I did my own data-gathering exercise across a selection of countries, drawing on national data sources and databases like Eurostat. The results are in the chart below, and they tally pretty well with the original figures.

If you want to explore data for other countries in Europe, here is a good resource.

What’s important to note about these numbers, though, is that they’re purely based on the length of the track that’s electrified. So if a country has 1000 kilometres of railways lines, and 500 kilometres are electrified, then their electrification rate is 50%. How busy these lines are is irrelevant. Not a single train could run on the non-electric part, and the rate would still be 50%.

This goes a long way toward explaining why frequent train travellers’ experiences of trains is at odds with some of these stats. Here’s a very helpful map of the rail network in Britain. The lines in red, yellow and green are electrified. The lines in grey are not, and run on diesel.

The very busy transport corridors — across the South-East of England, the central belt of Scotland, and long links between the two are electric. When I’m travelling up and down between Edinburgh and London, I’m always on an electric line, regardless whether it passes through major cities on the East or West coast.

For those living and travelling outside of this central, high-traffic zone, the experience is quite different. The trains run far less often, and they’re usually running on diesel.

Source: RailMap

What happens if we weight by how much traffic actually runs on these lines?

I’ve tried to do that in the chart below.¹ This tells us what share of passenger train kilometres were electrified. Now, this takes account of the fact that trains on some routes are running back and forward a lot (see the footnote for an example of the calculation).²

This metric doesn’t capture how many people are on the train. One route could be rammed while the other has two people per carriage, and they’d be treated the same. If you were to adjust for this, the numbers would change even more.

What we see if that the share for a lot of countries is higher than the earlier metric covering just the distance of the railway track. The UK moves from just over one-third to almost two-thirds. Japan moves up to over 90%.

It makes little difference to US and Canada: their rail networks are just not electrified, and there’s no metric that’s going to tell a different story.

Another big factor in these statistics is freight: the transport of goods and materials.

I’ve done the same adjustment for freight, in the chart below. This time it’s adjusted for tonne-kilometres.

Here, the UK does particularly badly: almost no freight is transported on electrified tracks. That didn’t surprise me much. What did was how high this was for other countries. My assumption would have been that most passenger links are on electrified lines, but the majority of freight still travelled by diesel. But the latter is not true across many countries, ranging from the Netherlands, Spain and France in Europe, to Japan, India and China elsewhere.

The US has basically no freight running on electric lines. It built a large diesel-powered network before the arrival of electrified overhead lines, and in fairness, it would probably take a lot of work to replace them over such large distances.

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Why should we care that we electrify more rail networks?

The answer for many readers of this newsletter is obvious: to reduce carbon emissions. There’s no easy way to decarbonise diesel, but we do know how to produce low-carbon electricity.

If this is what we’re interested in, how many journeys are electric versus diesel matters more how much of track is electrified. In the same way that how many coal plants you have matters much less than how often they’re running.

Even then, it’s hard to get excited about rail electrification for the direct emissions benefits. Globally, rail accounts for just 0.2% of CO₂ emissions.³ We’re building out large infrastructure projects to skim off a tenth of a percent of emissions.

Making rail travel cleaner isn’t going to make much difference. But having people switch from the car or plane to the train, could. That’s the strongest climate case for electrifying rail: making the experience better and faster so that people are more incentivised to switch.

Electric trains tend to be quieter and smoother. They can accelerate faster, and even standard ones reach higher top speeds than diesel ones. All of these can add up to more frequent, faster and pleasant journeys. And to even consider high-speed rail you need to go electric.

There are benefits beyond climate, too. Electric trains are much more energy-efficient. They tend to cost less to maintain and run. They improve air quality, which is particularly important in dense cities. Faster services can keep more remote places better-connected.

Again, what progress metric matters most depends on your ranking of these benefits. If it’s about keeping all areas of a country well-connected, maybe it is about the length of track that’s electrified. If it’s about costs, the focus would be on most high-traffic areas.

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Britain’s progress on electrification is slow

So, how is Britain doing on its journey to electrifying its rail network?

Not great.

Below you can see how much electrified rail was completed each year since the 1990s. Progress has been very stop-start, without a consistent buildout. In some years, we’ve upgraded basically no track at all.

Let’s put these numbers in context.

In an article for Britain Remade, Ben Hopkinson estimates that for the UK to reach its electrification targets by 2050, we’d need to electrify around 13,000 km of track over 27 years. Or, around 500 km per year.

Just one year in three decades actually passed that target. In most years, we’re doing less than 200 kilometres. In 2022, we managed a whopping 2 kilometres.

Other countries have not been as stop-start. In that same article, Ben compares Britain’s efforts to that of Germany. It has been electrifying at a very consistent pace for decades.

This likely makes the whole programme cheaper. Ben estimates that electrifying Britain’s rail network will cost approximately £31 billion. If it were able to match the costs of Germany or Denmark, it would cost half as much.

Source: Ben Hopkinson. Infrastructure Costs: Electrification. Britain Remade

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1. Finding and standardising data on this was more difficult than I'd expected. I think the data is pretty robust, but there will be some variation within 5 percentage points or so, depending on the source.

2. Take our previous example of 500 kilometres of electric track, and 500 diesel-powered (giving an electrification rate of 50%). If we had 10 trains run once across that entire 500-kilometre track in a given day, and just 1 train running once on diesel, our electrification rate by this metric would be 91%.

That’s because the total distance covered would be 5500 kilometres (500km * 10 journeys on the electric track, plus 500km * 1 journey on the diesel). The electrified distance covered (5000 kilometres) is 91% of the total (5500km).

3. Rail accounts for around 1% of transport emissions.

And transport accounts for around one-quarter of total emissions.

That means rail is around 0.2% of all emissions.