The Man Behind Hydrail

IEEE Life Senior Member H. Stan Thompson has lived a couple of professional lives. For decades, he was a planning engineer and futurist at Bellsouth Telecommunications, which was formed from the merger of two Regional Bell Operating Companies around the time AT&T (“Ma Bell”) was forced to break up in 1984.

When he retired in 1996, Thompson assumed he’d live out his golden years puttering around Mooresvile, N.C., the Charlotte suburb he calls home. But fate had a different plan: Over the past two decades, he has been the prime mover behind transforming a local effort to make hydrogen the fuel of choice for rail transit into a global phenomenon.

In 2004, the “Centralina” region (the Greater Charlotte metro area, which straddles the North Carolina–South Carolina border) was designated as a non-attainment area for ozone under the Clean Air Act. The area stood to lose billions of dollars of federal funding for a wide variety of projects if the area’s air quality didn’t improve.

Thompson stepped forward with an idea he thought would help. Local officials were mulling over an idea to put a then-idle Norfolk Southern Railroad industrial access line connecting the cities back into service as a commuter railway. Thompson’s proposal: seek federal innovation funding to upgrade and maintain a 9.6-km (6 mile) section of the proposed rail line that lay outside Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County and would therefore not be funded by big city taxes. Furthermore, he suggested, the trains could be powered electrically by hydrogen. Doing so, he reasoned, would ensure that the rail corridor didn’t exacerbate the area’s air quality issues with emissions from diesel engines while also avoiding the high cost of electrifying the line with an overhead catenary system.

Thompson’s work on that project, under the aegis of the Mooresville Hydrail Initiative comprising himself and former Mooresvile mayor Bill Thunberg, led him to coin the term “hydrail” and ignited what has become a second career. IEEE Spectrum recently spoke with Thompson about hydrail’s origins and where it stands now.

For many years, you were the convener of the International Hydrail Conferences (IHCs). What role did the conferences play in helping to advance hydrogen-powered rail transit from an idea to a real-world happening?

H. Stan Thompson: Well, first, let me make sure that Jason Hoyle [now the principal energy policy analyst at EQ Research, a Cary, N.C.–based firm that mostly focuses on state-level energy regulation and legislation] gets credit for having put these things together. I had the idea for doing it, but Jason was the one who did all the work to make it happen. The role the IHCs initially played was to make the first people out there who were theorizing about the role hydrogen could play in rail transport aware that each other existed, how far they had proceeded, what technologies they were pursuing, and how the best practices might evolve.

What was the initial inspiration to have a train that runs on hydrogen instead of diesel?

Thompson: I knew that trains were going to run on hydrogen as far back as 1994. I had a paper that I had to edit about the future of power and energy when I was still with Bellsouth. When I came to the way that electricity was going to be transmitted, I realized that major changes would take place not only regarding the grid, but with respect to things that carry energy onboard.

What is the present-day status of hydrail, in terms of new projects and installations?

Thompson: The most important thing that’s going on is that CSX Railway, one of the largest in the world, is working with the Canadian Pacific–Kansas City Railway to make not only hydrogen-powered locomotives for the two companies’ own use, but to also make diesel-to-hydrogen conversion kits to sell to other major railways. The first manufacturing facility for that, located in Huntington, W.Va., is up and running. Though that is virtually unknown outside the rail industry, I consider it to be big news.

Rail giant CSX unveiled this hydrogen-powered locomotive, made in partnership with Canadian Pacific–Kansas City, in early 2024.CSX

I’m concerned that the public, particularly in the U.S., is not informed about major transport infrastructure issues. Other examples include the fact that Airbus and nearly all other major aviation companies have begun working on hydrogen-fueled aviation, and the biggest companies in shipping, including Maersk, are heavily involved—and quite far along—in advancing hydrogen’s use in cargo ships. Furthermore, the trucking industry is also far along the road toward making hydrogen available at truck stops. And when hydrogen fueling becomes common at truck stops, that’s when hydrogen automobiles will begin to take market share. That’s the way diesel became widely available. The first Mercedes and Volkswagen Golf diesels, along with a few Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles first relied on truck stops. And when there were enough of these cars around to justify putting in diesel pumps at convenience stores, diesel soon became as widely available as gasoline. But I predict that when this happens with hydrogen, hydrogen-powered vehicles will supplant the plug-in electrics. They will offer much greater range and will be refueled as quickly as vehicles that run on petroleum products.

Using hydrogen, whose byproduct is water vapor, for propulsive power instead of diesel, which yields carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides, is obviously better for the environment. But what advantage does hydrail provide compared with electric power via a third rail or overhead catenary system?

Thompson: It’s dramatically cheaper, simply because with hydrail there is no need for wayside power or any of the infrastructure it takes to transmit electricity to the wayside. Let’s look at some basic numbers: One hydrogen refueling station costs about $2 million. That 2 million covers the entire corridor. But an overhead catenary costs that much for a quarter mile [0.4 kilometer] of the track.

What were the major inflection points at which progress toward regular hydrail service became evident?

Thompson: The first one was the development of the first hydrogen mining locomotive, in Colorado. It used fuel cells so the miners could avoid having to charge batteries. I’d like to think that our decision to hold the first International Hydrail Conference in 2005 was an inflection point, because the people who thought they were working alone discovered that a number of people were working on getting trains to run on hydrogen for similar reasons. By far the biggest inflection point was when Robert Stasko organized the 8^th International Hydrail Conference (8IHC) in Toronto. That was where representatives of the Hydrogenics fuel cell company [known as Accelera since its its acquisition by commercial engine manufacturer Cummins] and the Alstom train manufacturing company realized that they had a common beneficial interest and began meeting behind the scenes. The result was the announcement, in 2014, that they were teaming up to build hydrail trains in Salzgitter, Germany. They followed through and introduced the Coradia iLint train in 2016. And there was 3IHC, held in North Carolina, which spurred the creation of a hydrail Ph.D. program at the University of Pisa in Italy, the ancient university where Galileo taught. That conference also led to hydrail’s development in India, which is proceeding apace.

Where does hydrail stand at present?

Thompson: I know Germany is doing hydrail and Britain has several hydrail projects. The United Kingdom, I think, has the most hydrail manufacturing projects of any country. They have at least five. Italy is experiencing rapid adoption of hydrail and hydrogen propulsion in general. The first narrow-gauge hydrail project is being undertaken in Switzerland. Sweden has freight hydrail trains in development, and hydrail freight trains are also being installed in Eastern Europe.

Alstom’s Coradia iLint hydrail train is shown here ferrying rail passengers to their destinations in Germany.Sabrina Adeline Nagel/evb

You recently mentioned that Spain has built a high-speed hydrail train. How big a deal is that?

Thompson: It’s very important because there’s nothing more technically challenging for hydrogen propulsion that remains to be attempted. Canadian Pacific showed hydrail had overcome its second-most difficult challenge when the company introduced its H2 0EL hydrail freight locomotives in 2022. I‘ve just learned that CRRC in China also introduced a high-speed hydrail train, the Cinova H2, this year.

What has been the most surprising development as hydrail has progressed from ideas on paper to steel wheels on rails?

Thompson: Most surprising has been the antipathy of the mass media. The continued belief that this is all some quixotic fever dream of mine—even after hydrogen-powered trains have gone into service—is one of the hardest things to accept. Basically, it boils down to the fact that we’re off message. The accepted narrative is that people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs come up with great ideas. The notion that two old guys sitting in the back of a jewelry store in a small southern town would have the power to change the railroad traction industry globally presents a level of cognitive dissonance many news outlets have yet to overcome.

What would you say has been the weirdest development?

Thompson: The overhead catenary technology that’s being installed in Charlotte now was invented at the behest of Emperor Alexander II of Russia in the early 1880s for a rail line in St. Petersburg, which was then Russia’s capital. Today, St. Petersburg is implementing the twenty-first century hydrail technology that was developed in the greater Charlotte area.