by guest blogger Stan Thompson
Fifteen years ago
the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy introduced the public to
the hydrail future of the railway industry in an invited article, “The
Mooresville Hydrail Initiative” (February 2004: volume 29, issue 4, page
438).
One main reason for
the IJHE article was to establish a short, Internet-searchable name for
hydrogen fuel cell railway traction technology so that developers, scholars and
everyone else who could help bring it alive could find each other and
collaborate.
We spread the
hydrail name far and wide in the public domain as fast as we could so that no
one would limit it by making the generic railway term a service mark. It was
meant for everybody.
But no matter how
hard we tried, many corporate communications types just didn’t get it. Some
capitalized hydrail, making others reluctant to use it. Instead they
inadvertently renamed it “hydrogen railway” or other generic descriptors—blinding
search engines to its existence, rather like God frustrating the general
contractor for the Tower of Babel project by taking away a shared language.
If a
“thing” doesn’t have a name, for a lot of purposes it just doesn’t
exist. In our time (since the Internet recreated the world) if the name isn’t
searchable the reality it represents exists minimally, if at all.
It didn’t help that
the Oxford English Dictionary was coy about whether to admit hydrail as a bona
fide word. To this day my local library cannot tell me whether the OED has
relented after thirteen International Hydrail Conferences at very
prestigious universities (last year at the University of Rome II at Tor
Vergata).
Thus this plea to
PR, Corp Com types and journalists around the world. Hydrogen fuel cell railway
traction has a name: hydrail (contracted from hydrogen railway).
If you feel a need
to append a descriptor, thats fine; it actually helps: “Last year the
first hydrail (hydrogen fuel cell railway) train went into service in
Niedersachsen, Germany.” If you choke at that, it’s OK to say,
” “Last year the first hydrogen fuel cell railway (hydrail)
train went into service in Niedersachsen, Germany.”
But please don’t
capitalize hydrail or infer that it’s a nickname or some other alternative to
the “real” designation. It is the real
designation.
You wouldn’t
write that “Norfolk Southern’s coal-fired boiled water (steam) locomotive
pulled an excursion train from Salisbury to Asheville” or that
“GE and Caterpillar supplied the fossil-fueled compression-ignition
(diesel) locomotives.”
Hydrail (the word)
debuted in print fifteen years ago. Hydrail (the reality) debuted on steel
tracks for the ticket-buying public in China, as urban trams, in 2016 and as
intercity passenger trains last year in Germany. So far, about twenty countries
have deployed hydrail or announced that they intend to.
Hydrail’s a real
word—and has been one for fifteen years.
Please use it freely.
