Archive: (broken)
From the post:
>Railroads might be a nineteenth century technology, but they’re still the backbone of cargo transportation in the 21st century. They’ve also far from run out of innovation, including this one which really just sounds like a hack: painting the rails white to beat the heat.
In the old days, when rails were short and riveted together, this might have been unecesssary; all those joints allowed for a lot of flex. But when you have kilometers of continously welded rail, the thermal expansion starts to matter. A lot. Even if the rails haven’t bent and buckled from excess heat, their capacity goes down. Trains must therefore slow way, way down in hot weather, reducing the overall amount of freight the system can handle.
Archive: (broken)
From the post:
>>Railroads might be a nineteenth century technology, but they’re still the backbone of cargo transportation in the 21st century. They’ve also far from run out of innovation, including this one which really just sounds like a hack: painting the rails white to beat the heat.
In the old days, when rails were short and riveted together, this might have been unecesssary; all those joints allowed for a lot of flex. But when you have kilometers of continously welded rail, the thermal expansion starts to matter. A lot. Even if the rails haven’t bent and buckled from excess heat, their capacity goes down. Trains must therefore slow way, way down in hot weather, reducing the overall amount of freight the system can handle.
