Meet H. Stan Thompson, the Man Who Coined the Term “Hydrail”

IEEE Life Senior Member H. Stan Thompson has lived a couple of professional lives. For decades, he was a planning engineer and futurist at Bellsouth Telecommunications, which was formed from the merger of two Regional Bell Operating Companies around the time AT&T (“Ma Bell”) was forced to break up in 1984.

When he retired in 1996, Thompson assumed he’d live out his golden years puttering around Mooresvile, N.C., the Charlotte suburb he calls home. But fate had a different plan: Over the past two decades, he has been the prime mover behind transforming a local effort to make hydrogen the fuel of choice for rail transit into a global phenomenon.

In 2004, the “Centralina” region (the Greater Charlotte metro area, which straddles the North Carolina–South Carolina border) was designated as a non-attainment area for ozone under the Clean Air Act. The area stood to lose billions of dollars of federal funding for a wide variety of projects if the area’s air quality didn’t improve.

Thompson stepped forward with an idea he thought would help. Local officials were mulling over an idea to put a then-idle Norfolk Southern Railroad industrial access line connecting the cities back into service as a commuter railway. Thompson’s proposal: seek federal innovation funding to upgrade and maintain a 9.6-km (6 mile) section of the proposed rail line that lay outside Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County and would therefore not be funded by big city taxes. Furthermore, he suggested, the trains could be powered electrically by hydrogen. Doing so, he reasoned, would ensure that the rail corridor didn’t exacerbate the area’s air quality issues with emissions from diesel engines while also avoiding the high cost of electrifying the line with an overhead catenary system.

Thompson’s work on that project, under the aegis of the Mooresville Hydrail Initiative comprising himself and former Mooresvile mayor Bill Thunberg, led him to coin the term “hydrail” and ignited what has become a second career. IEEE Spectrum recently spoke with Thompson about hydrail’s origins and where it stands now.

For many years, you were the convener of the International Hydrail Conferences (IHCs). What role did the conferences play in helping to advance hydrogen-powered rail transit from an idea to a real-world happening?

H. Stan Thompson: Well, first, let me make sure that Jason Hoyle [now the principal energy policy analyst at EQ Research, a Cary, N.C.–based firm that mostly focuses on state-level energy regulation and legislation] gets credit for having put these things together. I had the idea for doing it, but Jason was the one who did all the work to make it happen. The role the IHCs initially played was to make the first people out there who were theorizing about the role hydrogen could play in rail transport aware that each other existed, how far they had proceeded, what technologies they were pursuing, and how the best practices might evolve.

What was the initial…