World's first solar-powered train.

[Gumboots]

An interesting project happening not that far from where I live. It's reactivating a short section of the old NSW north coast main line, which has lain unused for years, to provide cheap public transport for the town of Byron Bay. The train will run entirely on solar power, which is a world first AFAIK. This makes it ideal for use with town limits. No catenary is required, and there is minimal noise, and no pollution to worry about.

There's an article here: World-first “solar train” about to be launched in Byron Bay

And the company's web site here: Byron Bay Railroad Company Ltd

The train will be using a restored and modified 600 class railmotor.

Our two carriage rail set was constructed as the first of ten “600 class” sets at the Chullora Railway Workshops, Sydney in 1949. From around 1942 – 1945 the Chullora Workshops were used to build Beaufort aircraft bombers during the Second World War. Following the war and with the massive influx of European immigrants, transporting people around the state was critical. So the Workshops innovatively used aluminium aircraft technology from their war efforts to produce high performance yet lightweight trains. Featuring aluminium fuselage construction – like the body of an aircraft but designed as a train – bolted onto lightweight steel railway carriage frames. Hence we have to this day a train that is lighter in weight than “light rail”. The value of this particular train is amply demonstrated by the fact that 92 vehicles were built to this basic design from 1949 – 1968.

The very last two car set constructed was 638/738 in 1968 which was specifically built with a more powerful Cummins diesel engine for hauling a parcels trailer on the steeply graded Casino to Murwillumbah line. These railcars have a long history in this area.

[Hawk]

It will be interesting to follow the progress of this endeavor to see how they do.

[undertoad]

Very interesting! Makes perfect sense for Australia to use some of that diamond light*. It's only a small-scale application, but imagine the future potential...

On the other side of the planet, there are fields and fields of solar panels in Burgenland on the way into Vienna from Budapest (the sun there also makes very good wine...); I read some PR from ÖBB about how these supply a good proportion of the power for the Raaberbahn (old name for the Vienna-Győr-Budapest line).

That's different from the Byron Bay setup, as there's catenary all the way so they can just pump the solar output into the feed. In Australia with those distances, something more self-contained like this is a better bet. Will be interesting to see what more comes of it.

(*) Never made it that far north in NSW when I was there (based in Melbourne), but I think I played at a mini-festival somewhere in the bush near Newcastle. I "think", because I drove all the way back along the Hume Highway the next day. Or rather the next afternoon and night, after I woke up alone in the middle of a forest, with my keyboard still set up on its own in a clearing.
I was surprised to see a WWII German U-Boot pointing straight towards me at one point (3am?), I think in Holbrook NSW. This was not a hallucination - some inspired lunatic had in fact trucked a surplus U-Boot all the way inland to the town square in Holbrook at some point and set it up there. Just for fun. Or maybe just to freak me out. But it's best not to take Australia's many wonderful insanities personally, especially when trying to drive the whole Hume Hwy in one night in a mentally-restricted state...

[Gumboots]

The grid does connect a lot of the country. We have what's called the "National Electricity Market", that takes in all the eastern states (Qld, NSW - including the ACT, Vic, and Tassie) plus South Australia. These are all connected to the one system, with interconnectors between the states. The NEM is actually a bit of a mess, for several reasons, but the idea is good in principle. We just need saner people running it.

WA and NT are separate, because of the distance as you suggest.

Anyway, the point is that Byron is on the grid and anyone at Byron can, if they want to, feed power they generate back into the grid. These guys are planning on doing that on days when they have surplus generation.

And yes it makes a lot of sense to use sunlight over here. It's often strong enough to kill people, so might as well use it for something.

[Ali Barba]

I very interesting idea, and one I've had years ago. We have more sunlight than any other country, and less rain to match! I had also wondered if it was possible to come up with a similar futuristic engine for RRT3? Would be very cheap to run.
BTW Byron Bay is lovely, must visit again some day.

[Gumboots]

Byron is rather nice.

Sure, you could do a train like that for RT3. In terms of modelling it's just a basic diesel twin-railcar set, so can be modelled like any other similar locomotive. You'd just skin the thing with solar panels on the roof. Easy.

To make it run in the game without requiring overhead wires you could set fuel type to diesel or steam (just for game purposes) and give it one of the electric train noises (set in the .lco file).

Alternatively, if you didn't want any electric trains running off overhead wires, you could leave fuel type as electric and use an alpha channel edit to Infrastructure.dds to make the catenary disappear in the game. That way you'd have electric track but no visible wires.