Oil Firing

This topic has been done before.

Any back of a napkin calculations show; given the efficiency of a steam loco, the weight of batteries required more or less outweigh the payload.

And running under 25kV at 300 amps results in 10,000 hp of electrical energy giving less than 1000hp sustained at the rails.

 

How much arable land is lying fallow in the UK? According to Government figures, the total croppable land area is 6.1 million hectares and, of that, a total of 4.1 million hectares was used to cultivate crops,
that's about 2/3rds.

 

Define "fallow" if it just means "not growing crops", then there's a lot of sports pitches, nature resrves, floodplains, pasture etc etc in that figure

 

I would imagine that "total cropable area" is unlikely to include the areas you mention, by and large, any ore than it would include house gardens, the New Forest, North Yorkshire Moors, Bodmin Moor etc.

 

Are you sure?

I haven’t studied the figures, but local authorities have local plans that define what the purpose of all the land in their area is. So I’d strongly suspect that land being used as eg a park, or golf course, or nature reserve, is not being counted in the figure for croppable land. And by the same token the 2million hectare discrepancy in the figures given by @Steve represents land that isn’t being farmed, presumably for reasons of not being economically viable to do so, but which could be farmed without a formal change in use through the planning system. Whereas you couldn’t farm your local park or golf course even if you wanted to.

Tom

 

I've two questions about that figure:
1. How much of that land is subject to set aside or equivalent arrangements
2. What is the correlation between "croppable" and the grade of land?

It might also then be interesting to see what if any of that land is in use for solar power.

 

https://www.gov.uk/government/stati...ral-land-use-in-united-kingdom-at-1-june-2025

Looks like it's even wierder.
"The utilised agricultural area is made up of all arable and horticultural crops, uncropped arable land including bare fallow and arable land used for environmental benefit, land used for outdoor pigs, temporary and permanent grassland and common rough grazing (Figure 1)."
So dartmoor, new forrest, pastures and floodplains could all be in there.

 

So in essence, it looks to be a very narrow survey for technical agricultural reasons rather than any wider view of land use

 

If you want an insight into the use of arable land, I'd suggest watching a few of Harry Metcalf's "Harry's Farm" YouTube videos.

The short of it is that the government are increasingly pushing farmers into turning land over for "rewilding" and similar schemes (on 'environmental' grounds) rather than for food production.
Something which Harry understandably struggles to get his head around, considering being a farmer is supposed to be about food production.

 

Then he needs to get his thinking hat on. Farming hasn't just been about that for some time.

Industrial farming has beem destroying soil fertility, flood resilience, natural predators for the last few hundred years, and those chickens are coming home to roost. (I ignore matters such as conservation and public access to land for the time being).

If you want food now, and in 100 years, things have to change.

 

Although I mentioned fallow in my post, the figures quoted were for ‘croppable area’ according to the government.

 

I don't disagree with this point, but realistically the timespan is post-WWII, in the UK at least. The period between 1750 and 1850 saw a massive increase in soil fertility through the use of better crop rotation patterns, coupled with efficiencies from land utilisation after the enclosure acts. In the latter part of the 19th Century there is obviously a greater use of chemical fertilizers, but the mechanisation of farming doesn't properly start until after WWI, and without that it's difficult to 'industrialise' farming in any meaningful way.

 

Would that be the same Harry Metcalf who also has an interesting collection of expensive motor cars that feature on his YT channel "Harry's Garage"?

 

Yes it is.
He's a farmer who founded Evo (car) magazine back in the 90s.

 

I wouldn't have called it croppable land!

 

Just to interject into the discussion about farmland being used for producing biofuels.

They are not the long term solution to some problems where other better solutions exist for example cars are much much better to electrify from an efficiency perspective. Growing biofuels if far far less efficient than just using the same field for just solar (ignoring the possible benefits of agrovoltaics) which in terms of energy usefully captured is better by about 10-40x and that is before factoring engine efficiencies etc. which mostly make the gap even wider. For something like a steam loco where direct electric power is less viable (although as pointed out not unheard of) then biofuels are the obvious option.

Before anyone gets up in arms about the solar comment with that in mind it is worth nothing that over the world huge tracts of farmland are already devoted to producing a biofuel in the form of ethanol for use in petrol. Probably not much of our land in the UK is used for that purpose, especially with the closure of the plant for converting the crops (unless I am mistaken) so I believe our ethanol is now all imported. However in the US almost half the corn they grow (it is worth noting land used to grow corn in the US is about 60% larger than the entire area of the UK) is used to produce ethanol which is also presumably the primary source of it in our petrol. To be clear I am not suggesting it as a fuel more that there is land which could be used for food that is already used for a biofuel. Even if that land was not suitable for growing rapeseed or an alternative oil crop directly if ethanol was no longer needed then that land could be used for food production and potentially free other land to produce an oil based biofuel.

Obviously that is a massive oversimplification but I think its important that people realise that there capacity globally in farming for biofuels and other things without needing to take land away from food production because the land is already not used for food. That so much land is already used to produce ethanol may come as a surprise to most and is actually quite shocking.

 

Following on from the governments serious alert yesterday, the HRA has issued a memo which effectively says railways shouldn't be using steam; the exception being for oil fired locos. There's the S160 on the NYMR. How many are there on the narrow gauge?

 

VoR no. 9 and Hunslet 0-4-2T 3752/1952 at Statfold are the only ones that spring to mind.

 

So who is the HRA memo aimed at, the whole of the UK or only the dry part? Steam is alive and active in NW Scotland where you would be hard put to set fire to the sodden landscape of Lochaber. This is a very real local problem but not a nationwide one. If you need to cool down and get a steam fix at the same time head up to Fort William.

Peter

 

This is Arisaig on Thursday afternoon when some parts of the country were suffering record breaking temperatures - it was at least 15 degrees cooler here



Peter