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On 6 February 2018, Alstom was awarded the Europe 1 Mobility Trophy for the Alstom Coradia iLint. The Coradia Lint is a single-unit or two-unit articulated railcar manufactured by Alstom, offered in diesel and hydrogen models.
Lint is short for leichter innovativer Nahverkehrstriebwagen, or light innovative local transport rail vehicle. It was designed by Linke-Hofmann-Busch, which was acquired 1996 by Alstom. The Coradia iLint is a version of the Coradia Lint 54 powered by a hydrogen-fuel cell.
This zero-emission train only emits steam and condensed water. The Coradia iLint combines several elements: clean energy conversion, flexible energy storage in batteries, and smart management of traction power and available energy.
The Coradia iLint is especially suited for operation on nonelectrified networks. It enables sustainable train operation while maintaining high train performance without the need to electrify rail lines to eliminate the disadvantages of diesel-powered trains.
The traction power is provided from batteries operating electric motors. The iLint train set is fueled from hydrogen tanks located on the roof of the train. Fuel cells convert the hydrogen from the tanks and the oxygen in the air to water, charging up onboard batteries to power the traction motors.
The first two trains were undergoing tests in Germany in early 2018 and were expected to transport their first revenue passengers in the second half of 2018 in Lower Saxony, the first region to have ordered 14 hydrogen trains. The Coradia iLint was designed by Alstom’s teams in Germany at Salzgitter, a center of excellence for regional trains, and in France, notably Tarbes, a center of excellence dedicated to traction systems, and Ornans for the engines, with the contribution of the sites of Villeurbanne and Saint-Ouen.
The Coradia iLint belongs to Alstom’s Coradia range of modular diesel-hauled and electrical-hauled trains (see Figures 7 and 8), but the iLint series of Coradia trains is the first to be powered by hydrogen-fuel cells. As of February 2018, more than 2,400 Coradia trains had been sold, and 1,900 were in operation in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Canada.
Full article: IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine, Volume 13, Number 3, September 2018 | 
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