Comment on Switzerland’s solar railway has been a success. What happens next?
iocase@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
I’m interested to see how it impacts maintenance for the permanent way. I don’t think it helps at all… Reballasting, tamping, changing sleepers, railhead grinding .etc all need to go places where these panels are, so now you have to remove them, do your maintenance, and put them back?
sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
I can’t find the article, but when I first read this news a couple of days ago, it mentioned that they could remove each panel in something like 10 minutes and it was as easy to put them back. I’ll look a little more and see if I can find it.
iocase@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
The issue is you need to grind the tracks multiple times a year on busy routes, along with ballast tamping or replacement. That’s set by total gross tonnage not by a set time span, and these maintenance items are not optional. Tamping prevents pumping and rail fatigue which can be catastrophic if you allow it to degrade and suddenly fail. Rail grinding removes microcracks created by fatigue due to every wheel passing over it. Grinding deletes the cracks, but if you leave it for too long the cracks grow and can total the rail. 10 minutes per panel is a long time when you need to maintain tens of thousands of kms of track.
Even a short distance between two towns is a maintenance headache. It could take weeks to remove the panels entirely and that’s before you get started doing maintenance at all… All you’ve accomplished is removing a maintenance obstacle you put there in the first place. Then you have to put it all back when you’re done…
A railroad typically spends 1-3% of the entire cost to build a km of track just to maintain it every year. That’s a big operating cost that eats into rail budgets already (part of why I believe they should all be nationalized to better align public incentives with a natural monopoly but that’s beyond this conversation.)
For reference, most rail costs around $1-3 million per km to build, $5-10 million or more within urban areas due to land acquisition. Typical railroad maintenance is somewhere around $10 000-$30 000 per km per year with unrestricted access. 20 mins round trip per panel (probably half an hour with deadtime between panels moving tools and gear) that’s a massive amount of increasedl about costs and service interruption.
Snapz@lemmy.world 6 days ago
You seem in good spirits, so not assuming you are a troll, but you realize that the 10 minute estimate instantly doubles because that’s both on and off for each panel. And the people who estimate work at scale never actually do the work, so add at least 5 mins per panel and multiple that by thousands per stretch of track to be regularly maintained.
And all of this ignoring that you now have an order of magnitude more potential failure points for both the panels, the tracks and the trains riding them. All as you assume that every single bolt, bracket and gasket will be properly reinstalled while workers do this mind numbing, repetitive task for days and weeks on end.
As a fun side benefit, the trains of course cannot run during this constant maintenance period.