7 ms·
The things people will do to avoid putting up catenaries truly are wild.
by occz 1y ago
The things people will do to avoid putting up catenaries truly are wild.
- lukan 1y agoBecause it is a huge investment, that also has maintainance costs. This train on the other hand seems superior in every way for this specific use case (getting ore from high altitude to low altidude and empty trains back up)
- unwind 1y agoIt's Australia, the rail line is 143 km (89 miles). Putting up poles and hanging catenaries over that kind of distance is probably not cheap? Either way it sounds brilliant, both simpler and better than catenaries, I like it!
- brnt 1y agoHow come Soviets electrified all rail? It wasn't because they're swimming in money...
- lukan 1y agoNo, but they were swimming in cheap labour.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- vkou 1y agoBecause prior to them, Russia was a backwater with anemic infrastructure, and they started massive greenfield infrastructure projects at a time that the technology was mature.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoA quick google says they hauled about 60% of their cargo with electric locomotives, 70% of passenger traffic. Currently about 51.5% of modern-day Russia's 105.000 km rail network is electrified. Compare with others on this chart (which seems to omit Russia for some reason): https://www.itf-oecd.org/transport-connectivity-trends-compared https://www.itf-oecd.org/transport-connectivity-trends-compa.... TL;DR, they did not, in fact, electrify all rail. As for your swimming in money comment, I'm not sure what you mean; the Soviet Union was an industrial powerhouse and the second largest economy in the world between WW2 and the mid-80's, its economic decline only started after that with economic liberalisation under Gorbachev, followed by both oil price collapse and the costliest disaster in human history (until then), the Chernobyl incident, both in '86. Japan overtook it as the 2nd largest economy only by 1990.
- looofooo0 1y agoAlso, if your mine is done, you can load up your trains and bring them to the next up to the mountain mine! Lifetime of the catenaries might be a lot longer than the mine.
- eru 1y agoThe economic liberalisation was a response to the decline. They didn't stray away from more 'proper' communism because everything was hunky dory, you know. Statistics about the Soviet economy are notoriously hard to make sense of. First, they ran a rather weird economic system (compared to the west), and second, you can't necessarily trust the statistics, there weren't really any independent organisations at all like we have in democracies. No independent media to check, no independent statistical institutes etc. Even in the west environmentalism was only just getting en vogue in the second half of the 20th century. But the Soviet Union takes the cake in terms of how much environmental damage they were willing to take for a bit of extra economic output.
- sidewndr46 1y agoComparing modern day Russia to the Soviet Union is not realistic.
- toast0 1y agoThey probably weren't sending loaded trains only downhill and only sending unloaded trains uphill. They also didn't have the same kind of battery capacity as we have today. Electrified rail avoids shipping the engine and the fuel with the load, which ia often a big win in efficiency.
- sidewndr46 1y agoElectrified rail is not magic, you still need an engine on at least 1 car. You still need some way of converting electrical current to a force to push you down the tracks.
- omgtehlion 1y agoWell, they did not. Only major lines are electrified
- kzrdude 1y ago143 km is very short for an Australian rail line. If you said it would cross all of Australia, then I'd believe you :)
- goodpoint 1y agoFor very good reasons.
- Tade0 1y agoThe project's cost is estimated to be $50mln, with the battery itself most likely being at most $10mln from that. That $50mln would maybe be enough to electrify a single, 40km track.