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Trains in Switzerland Are Now Running Over Solar Panels in a First-of-Its-Kind Test
(www.zmescience.com)
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I agree with you in that a lot of his arguments are inconveniences rather than blockers. but there are still a lot of problems with the design when we could easily not put them right exactly there and end up with a better outcome.
Dust + water isn't going to just brush off, they'll need to send purpose build devices to wash them and it's not going to work well at speed.
Rebalasting track has to happen based on environment. Some areas will need it often, the rocks beneath the ties end up getting pushed deeper and need to be back-filled
Waste has a lot of mineral content and the bioplaques are incredubly durable and not see through.
Coal is less prevalant, but even at that, yhere is noting clean about rail lines. Brakes, metal on metal wheels. def need to wash the panels and probably agitate to get dirt off that close to the suspension. It's solvable. but putting them on racks a few feet away from the track would be less of a mess, not cost all that much and make maintenance and diagnostics easier.
All in all, putting them along rail lines is a reasonable idea, but there's no real need to cause all these difficulties if they just put them up on slightly elevated structures to one side of the track. The cost for galvanized pipes is barely a rounding error on the whole project.