25 K V AC Railway Electrification - History

History

The first successful operational and regular use of the 50 Hz system dates back to 1931, tests having run since 1922. It was developed by Kálmán Kandó in Hungary. He used 16 kV AC at 50 Hz, asynchronous traction, and an adjustable number of (motor) poles. The first electrified line for testing was Budapest–Dunakeszi–Alag. The first fully electrified line was Budapest–Győr–Hegyeshalom (part of the Budapest–Vienna line). Although Kandó's solution showed a way for the future, railway operators outside of Hungary showed a lack of interest in the design.

The first railway to use this system was completed in 1951 by SNCF between Aix-les-Bains and La Roche-sur-Foron in southern France, initially at 20 kV but converted to 25 kV in 1953. The 25 kV system was then adopted as standard in France, but since substantial amounts of mileage south of Paris had already been electrified at 1,500 V DC, SNCF also continued some major new DC electrification projects, until dual-voltage locomotives were developed in the 1960s.

The main reason why electrification at this voltage had not been used before was the lack of reliability of mercury-arc-type rectifiers that could fit on the train. This in turn related to the requirement to use DC series motors, which required the current to be converted from AC to DC and for that a rectifier is needed. Until the early 1950s, mercury-arc rectifiers were difficult to operate even in ideal conditions and were therefore unsuitable for use in the railway industry.

It was possible to use AC motors (and some railways did, with varying success), but they did not have an ideal characteristic for traction purposes. This was because control of speed is difficult without varying the frequency and reliance on voltage to control speed gives a torque at any given speed that is not ideal. This is why DC series motors were the best choice for traction purposes, as they can be controlled by voltage, and have an almost ideal torque vs speed characteristic.

In the 1990s, high-speed trains began to use lighter, lower-maintenance three-phase AC induction motors. The N700 Shinkansen uses a three-level converter to convert 25 kV single-phase AC to 1,520 V AC (via transformer) to 3,000 V DC (via phase-controlled rectifier with thyristor) to a maximum 2,300 V three-phase AC (via a variable voltage, variable frequency inverter using IGBTs with pulse-width modulation) to run the motors. The system works in reverse for regenerative braking.

The choice of 25 kV was related to the efficiency of power transmission as a function of voltage and cost, not based on a neat and tidy ratio of the supply voltage. For a given power level, a higher voltage allows for a lower current and usually better efficiency at the greater cost for high-voltage equipment. It was found that 25 kV was an optimal point, where a higher voltage would still improve efficiency but not by a significant amount in relation to the higher costs incurred by the need for greater clearance and larger insulators.