There's plenty of train lines in the world that see very few trains, maybe only one an hour, where the business case for electrification is much weaker. Many of these lines are already questionable from a business case point of view which can deter anything that would increase infrastructure costs, and if hydrogen trains can approach the operational cost of electric trains then there's a clear business case for them.
Yep. The trains in the article (Cuxhaven-Bremerhaven) go once per hour. That entire region of Germany, and the area of the Netherlands that borders it, has an enormous amount of trains running on a 1x/hourly schedule. Groningen-Leeuwarden, Groningen-Delfzijl etc etc. All running (diesel-electric) Stadler FLIRT trains, which have taken the world by storm.
The political decisions in these less populated regions are similar to small town politics in two ways: the budgets are tiny (aka no money for electrification) and a fairly small group can push things through if it fits their agenda. For those reasons I think these hydrogen trains could totally become popular for less densely populated areas like this.
> if hydrogen trains can approach the operational cost of electric trains
That's exceptionally unlikely.
You go from "use electricity to run a train" to "use electricity to run an electrolyseur, fill hydrogen into hydrogen tanks on the train, use hydrogen to power a fuel cell to generate electricity, use that electricity to run a train".
You need to add "build electric lines over entire length railway" to the left side of the equation and "build a hydrogen locomotive" to the right side.
Hydrogen is easier to store than electricity, and you can produce it at times where electricity price is zero or negative (very sunny days at photovoltaic plants, very windy days at wind turbine plants, 3am at nuclear plants). Processes more efficient than electrolysis do exist.
I suppose safe storage and transportation of hydrogen is a major cost, though. Hydrogen gets absorbed into metals, because their crystalline lattices act like sponges for molecules this small. Worse yet, hydrogen can seep through things that work as impenetrable solids for other gases. And hydrogen flame is all but invisible (most radiation is infrared, nearly no visible light).
