I often have wondered what a diesel electric or a electric loco costs from a capital point of view. There are a number of new steam builds going on at the moment for, say, £2-3M (same cost as a non UK built electric loco?) and surely there comes a point where burning some local ‘eco’ fuel (maybe sewage gas for example) plus the increased labour for maintenance is going to be cheaper than importing both electric loco‘s and fuel?

UK balance of payments is dire, yet we seem content is acquiring everything from outside the UK. According to the IMF the UK net worth in 2020 was -$3225678 million… note the minus sign. It sounds dire. (data.imf.org/regula.asps. 

Although I am electrical engineer not an accountant!

[PBL] Do British trains run on grid electricity? 

[broadgage] Yes UK trains do use grid electricity and have done so for many years.

Interesting. Swiss rail is almost entirely electric and has been for a century. But they have their own power stations. Gideon supposed a very good reason for that, as shown by the following example. On 22 June 2005 they had a system-wide power outage. They had apparent instances of regenerative braking in Ticino, far more than there were actually trains on the track, as far as I remember, and it tripped the supply there, which started a trip cascade. Later in the year, Carsten Weber explained what happened at a Workshop I was running. Took him about 40 minutes. At the end, he said “and that took 8 seconds.”