I was waiting at a railroad crossing for an CSX train. As it went by, it had solar panels on the hoppers! There is a coal power plant in Etowa,TN that these trains feed coal too. Has anyone seen this before. Do you know why it has solar panels on the hoppers?
Andy
GOOGLE search: "solar panels on railcars"
yeilds this amongst other results
http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20090001226
paragraph 23
23. The railcar acoustic monitoring system of claim 4 wherein the power source is a battery, a rechargeable battery, a solar panel, an electrical generator coupled to a rotating component of the railcar running gear, or any combination thereof and wherein the processor is configured to conserve power by entering a sleep mode and actuate upon receiving a
wake control signal.
So, they keep the batteries charged on a brake monitoring system
GOOGLE is your friend. Try it to find answers to questions like this. :thumb:
Could these have been orange, maintenance of way hoppers? Similar to this?
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1385473
A hi-rail truck rolls by, and via computer, will determine how much ballast is needed at a particular point. This information is transferred to a later ballast train. Each hopper has a computer and power supply (solar panel) on it, and will dump the right amount of ballast at each location. People are still needed to monitor it, but not quite so many as a regular, manual ballast dump.
I think I've seen photos of BNSF cars like this, and probably other Class 1 railroads will have them also.
Trains had an article about these, sometime within the last couple years.
James
Solar panels could have a use when the engine is idling or not moving to keep heaters and other equipment running without powering the prime mover to do it.
Perhaps in instances where cars are refridgerated and have to be kept cool that can also benefit. Again though the amount of power consumed versus that being generated is a bit of toss up.