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One can't help but think that the solar panels 5 meters to the left out of the permanent way would be a lot more cost-effective and not require degreasing of the panels.
Exactly.Theyre basically a roof with no moving parts. Why insist on installing them into the least hospitable place?
So you can pay for cleanup
Is there buildup of grease? I didn't notice mention of it in the article. Being centered would give more exposure time vs. on the side where there might be trees. Having them above as a roof means more cost and structure to maintain, and accessibility issues. Maybe whatever they do get on them isn't a lot over time and is easier to clean than dealing with the other options.
Train bearings are greased with grease guns like a lot of things, and you tell when it's full by when grease shoots out. The reason there's room for grease to fill a bearing before it finally shoots out during maintenance (since it had to do that the last time it was greased) is by slowly losing grease over time just due to things moving and seals not being perfect. Multiply that by hundreds of axles each with two bearings, and 8-15 trains per day per direction.
I get that, it must be something to consider, as well as just general dirt and other pollutants. But is that grease loss over the rails primarily or thrown everywhere? Someone who works the rails might know just from experience. Or the first run of this would have noted the problem, and maybe it wasn't anything different than any other solar panel and what crap they pick up regardless of where they are. But ground level is about as easy access for cleaning as you can get.
From what I know most of the grease should be coming from within the rails since that's where the roller bearings are and the underside of rolling stock is coated with a constant film of rust and grease.
Cleaning wouldn't be too hard especially if you made a train that carried its own water tanks and pressure washer spray. The downside is needing to take up a slot of revenue service to run a washing train. Putting more maintenance inside of the revenue generating part of a permanent way is pants on head regarded in my opinion. Like OOP said, put them next to the permanent way since the right of way usually is big enough you can do that.
There's also the fact that railhead grinders probably don't work with these in place which wears the rails out faster if you can't grind it (we're talking an order of magnitude faster if you don't grind microfractures or microcracking out), or necessitates removing them so you can regrind the rail head profile and delete micro cracking from fatigue cycling before it spreads and the entire rail needs to be replaced. Then you have to put these panels back in place.
In a normal rail setup you can run a grinding train in between revenue trains. With this you probably need to close the track, set up derails, remove panels with a crew, grind the rails, and put them back. Each step in that process is a crew day as opposed to a grinding train.
That makes sense. Wonder how much of that was considered in the test runs. Often times some of these green projects like to leave out the extras to pad their worth. At least this makes more sense than solar roads, which have so much more issues to deal with in wear and tear, even though the real estate is huge.
I think it should have been obvious to anyone at the railroad at the very least. They obssess over this stuff since it's their entire business... They've been around for 2 centuries so what impacts a railway is really well understood.
IMHO there's a not-insignificant amount of environmental grifting dressed up like incompetence... The trial gets funding, the railroad gets compensation... Everyone makes money and now a second trial is guaranteed once this one fails.
I'm not saying all environmental stuff is like this but c'mon... It's either political or grifting or even both... I don't see why else they would think this is worth trying.
It's profitable to greenwash. Every once in a while something legit gets through.
Even if there is, you can just make a custom train car for cleaning the panels. There are custom trains for cutting trees, grass or anything else that is involved in maintaining train infrastructure. This just adds one more custom train to the list.
Yeah you're right but that's beside the point I think. The fact that these panels interfere with railhead grinding and other routine track maintenance means they're a huge extra cost center you have to spend on every time you touch anything on the rails. Plus service trains take up blocks that could be used by revenue service where they instead cost money to operate. It's easier to put these next to the permanent way instead of directly smack in the middle.
Then the brushes on the trains wouldn't clean them.
Are rail right-of-ways that wide though?
HS2 is currently being built and you can see the worksite from space.
Thats a lot of workspace to fit solar after they move out.
Usually, the right of way, atleast in countries like the UK are quite wide. Some of that is because beeching pulled up the rails and there is just empty space now, some of that is because it just needs room to breath and put switchgear and control boxes.
In Canada they have 10m left and right of the rail alignment usually. It's a massive strip of land when you add it all up, and it already has power runs for signaling, axle counters, hotbox detectors .etc
The large gaps left and right of the tracks where required for steam locomotives, so any sparks flying out of the burner would not ignite nearby trees or bushes.