Irish Storage Battery To be Used on Trains

Horowhenua Chronicle, 27 May 1931, Page 8

Irish Storage Battery To be Used on Trains

QUICK RE-CHARGE INVENTION DUBLIN, April 14. The new Drumm quick re-charge electric storage battery, which can draw a train at 60 miles an hour and will, it is claimed, revolutionise electrical transport, is emerging from its experimental stage. It is to be, put into regular passenger service on the Great Southern Railway’s line between Dublin and Bray this summer. Dr. James Drumm, the young Irish inventor of the battery, believes that, at greatly reduced cost, the Drumm battery will provide all the advantages ot comfort, convenience and speed provided by the third-rail system of railway in use on London’s underground transport. The Irish Free State Government recently voted £25,000 for further research and practical railway tests with the battery. It has also obtained a controlling interest in Celia, Ltd., the company which is financing it. The entire power output of the Shannon hydro-electric scheme would, it is stated, be utilised by the adoption of storage battery power in place of the present steam power of imported coal. A two-coach train driven by one of the batteries, said Dr. Drumm, was capable of covering 350 miles in a running day of 17 hours. The rate of acceleration on a level tangent track was one mile per hour per second up to a speed of 35 miles per hour. And the battery’s life' for such service would be 400,000 miles. “The first battery coach constructed is being made to operate a ckcidedly severe service,” continued Dr. Drumm. “From Kingsbridgc to Inchicore is" a gradient of 1 in 84, which means that ordinary passenger and goods trains leaving Kingsbridgc have an extra engine provided to get them over the gradient. “The train driven by the new battery comes up the hill at 25 miles per hour with from 50 to 60 passengers. This is a definite achievement. “In the Free State railway conditions are peculiarly adapted to the use of the new battery. Traffic is of a light nature; distances are short —60 miles is the longest non-stop. The country is level and there are no tunnels. “The system of rapid charging is peculiar to the now battery. It is not possible to charge lead batteries at a rapid rate because of their essentially inherent characteristics of concentration—polarisation. No doubt other alkaline batteries, more particularly those of the Edison type, can be charged at high rates for a short time. “For example, an Edison battery can be ‘boosted’ at five times the normal rate for five minutes without prejudice to the life of the battery. Those who have experience of the practical life of alkaline batteries will realise that this docs not mean that such batteries can be operated continuously on a mere system of ‘boost’ or rapid charge. “In the new Irish battery the internal resistance is only one-tenth that of the lowest resistance alkaline cell of the same ampere-hour capacity. This means that very large currents can be maintained or discharged without excessive drop in battery voltage and, on charging, ‘boosting’ rates can be applied almost indiscriminately,” Dr. Drumm stated.