Trains May Soon Come Equipped With Debris-Zapping Lasers

Molly McHugh writes: Holland's chief transportation service is testing a unique new way to clear the rails of fallen leaves and other small debris: by mounting lasers on the fronts of locomotives. The lasers will cause the leaves, which produce a condition commonly referred to as "slippery rail" in the fall and winter months, to vanish in a puff of smoke.

Comments

They're leaves.

[Falos]

Wouldn't it be easier to mount brushes or something?

Re:They're leaves.

[jandrese]

I'm guessing anything that directly touches the track is going to wear down fairly quickly, and anything that doesn't directly touch the track is going to miss wet leaves that are plastered to it.

Re:They're leaves.

[MyLongNickName]

Wouldn't it be easier to mount brushes or something?

Maybe, but not nearly 1/20th as cool as lasers. Please turn in your nerd card at the door.

Re:They're leaves.

[Matheus]

Exercise for the reader: Try sweeping the leaves off of your driveway or sidewalk when they are wet and stuck to the pavement. Now imaging accomplishing that in a single high-speed sweep.

IANATE but I believe many trains already have such a brush but even if they don't they are not effective.

Freaking laser beams have a bunch of other issues but are WAY cooler ;-)

Re:They're leaves.

[iggymanz]

gee I hope the third rail contacts on the electrical train I road to work don't hear you

Re:They're leaves.

[jandrese]

You mean the biggest wear item on those trains? What don't they want to hear?

Re:They're leaves.

[Anonymous Coward]

anything that directly touches the track

High pressure air then. Got to be less harmful to the steel than a wet leaf vaporizing laser.

A couple thousand PSIG will take off the wet leaves, water, ice, light rust, paint and anything else they could possibly care about.

Re:They're leaves.

[ArcadeMan]

Indeed. Where are they going to attach the sharks?

Re:They're leaves.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that the details differ(probably enough that what I'm about to say will cause any subject-matter-expert to want to punch me); but the third rail contact is essentially a consumable, like a heroic-scale version of the 'brushes' used in electric motors(except the brushless ones, obviously).

Re:They're leaves.

[mi]

Indeed. Where are they going to attach the sharks?

My first thought too. One way would include a special fish-tank car being pushed in front of the locomotive...

Re:They're leaves.

[ShanghaiBill]

High pressure air then.

If the air nozzle is close to the track, it will be hit by debris, and need frequent repairs. If it is located farther above the track, the air stream will dissipate.

Got to be less harmful to the steel than a wet leaf vaporizing laser.

The laser does not turn on continuously while the leaf vaporizes. It fires a very short burst, delivering all the energy to the leaf. Then it stops, while the leaf is hot enough to vaporize, but has not yet done so. The surface of the rail should not be ablated at all.

Re:They're leaves.

[iggymanz]

you're wrong about that, try the filters in the HVAC system.

Point is even a component that scrapes rail under brutal arcing conditions can last, so brush system would be non-issue

Re:They're leaves.

[nitehawk214]

gee I hope the third rail contacts on the electrical train I road to work don't hear you

Re:They're leaves.

[Deadstick]

It will also shoot out car windshields with pebbles and other loose objects. High-pressure air is a serious industrial safety concern.

Re:They're leaves.

[iggymanz]

yes gravity shoe is consumable, every 50,000km on the four-shoe cars my city uses. Brushes would have much less brutal a life than those things

Re:They're leaves.

[xaxa]

High pressure air then

FT2ndArticle: "We have a fleet of rail-head treatment trains which clean the rails using water jets and then apply a sand-based gel to help trains gain adhesion."

Another page says there are 55 treatment trains. There are something like 4000 "trains", so maybe the point of this system is it can be attached to normal trains, rather than requiring a special train.

Re:They're leaves.

[durrr]

Pushing the turbo button for a brush won't clear away jumpers or renegade livestock standing on the rail.

Re:They're leaves.

[iggymanz]

My point not shot down at all, shoes are replaced every 50,000km in the cars in my city. Brush of proper material could have huge life, wear not a barrier to use. In fact, they do put in "scrapers" next to the pickup shoes in the winter months for ice and snow. Is any of this getting through to you? can you connect the dots?

Re:They're leaves.

[Todd Palin]

And high powered lasers aren't?

Re:They're leaves.

[ArcadeMan]

It's not Pirate Day, buddy.

Re: They're leaves.

[Lallo]

Do you really think you could find a material strong enough to withstand the forces a train puts on them, while also being soft enough that it doesn't damage the rails? I'm thinking that was the big motivation here, to find a solution that doesn't add to the wear and tear those rails already go through.

Re:They're leaves.

[Dzimas]

Trains have been around for several centuries. If there was a trivial solution to remove leaves from the track, it would have been implemented 100+ years ago.

Re:They're leaves.

[Deadstick]

At least those are pointed down at the track; the reflections aren't much of a hazard. But yes, if the train rolls over you, you may incur eye damage.

Re:They're leaves.

[currently_awake]

This won't happen, due to the fire hazard it presents. Everyone who owns property along the tracks would sue to prevent flaming leaves from starting brush fires and forest fires.

Re:They're leaves.

[ShanghaiBill]

This won't happen, due to the fire hazard it presents.

In Holland? In the winter months? I don't think so. Everything is cold and damp. There is rain and drizzle almost every day. The ground oozes water into your footprints.

Even if it does start a brush fire, they can put it out it by opening a dike.

Re:They're leaves.

[iggymanz]

You mean like Railhead Treatment Trains (RHTT) with various attachments and devices such as high power water jets, anti-freeze sprayers, ice/snow scrapers, traction gravel laying?

Yeah, existed long before you were born and in use now. They work fine, and without lasers.

Re:They're leaves.

[Aighearach]

1) Bag clip
2) slap-chop
3) Floating arm trebuchet

Re:They're leaves.

[Anonymous Coward]

At least those are pointed down at the track; the reflections aren't much of a hazard.

Lasers strong enough to set things on fire quickly tend to also be strong enough to cause eye damage from diffuse reflection, especially when you are trying to burn something larger than a pin point and that is possibly quite damp.

Re:They're leaves.

[Aighearach]

*pew!* *pew!* *pew!* *splat*

I'm not convinced pre-cooking the jumper is going to reduce the cleanup very much.

Re: They're leaves.

[sexconker]

What forces does the train put on them, exactly? Draw me a diagram.
If we followed your dumbass thinking we wouldn't have street sweepers, tires, or shoes.

Re:They're leaves.

[stjobe]

They're not "just leaves".

I thought this looked familiar, and sure enough, google turned up this article from 2007 about the system and the guy who spent eight years and 5 million GBP to try to solve it.

"Every time a train runs over a pile of leaves, they are squashed into a hard, black, shiny, Teflon-like substance that makes it more difficult for trains to slow down and stop."

"Rofin-Sinar created a monster. The final version of the laser railhead cleaner contains two lasers capable of producing 2kW each. The pulsed energy is channelled via a fibre optic, which delivers a round beam in a straight line across the rail.
The pulsed beam hits the rail 25,000 times per second. The leafy mulch absorbs each 5,000C pulse of light, causing it to heat rapidly, expand and lift off the rails. Tests have found that the laser cleaner also works on oil, grease, ice and other problematic substances."

Re:They're leaves.

[DerekLyons]

Well, those contacts do wear down and require require regular maintenance as do the rails themselves. That such maintenance was done is the reason you were able to get to work.

Re:They're leaves.

[rtb61]

The solution is pretty simple. Basically a train is not just one set of wheels but many sets of wheels and basically not every wheel on the train needs to function in exactly the same manner. So the rear wheels can provide most of the breaking, middles sets support and the front sets specifically designed to displace materials on the track. They do not need to be under full load but only under partial sprung load, with there surface designed to break up materials and push them off to one side. There is a huge amount of difference between the hardness of the track and the hardness of the material on the track which gives you lots of space to work in between to eliminating the build up on the track. Diagonal serrations on the front two sets of wheels say under a load of only 200 kilograms.

Re:They're leaves.

[osu-neko]

They work fine, and without lasers.

Eh, okay, maybe they're adequate, but they have the huge disadvantage you noted: no lasers!

Re:They're leaves.

[BlacKSacrificE]

All of which require refilling, replacement of scraper edges, and replenishment at x interval. They work, but they are not the best solution. A laser has no moving parts, and runs on the power that the train already provides, and if built reliably enough, will last the life of the engine with nothing more than the odd clean of its lens. This is evolution of technology, you should try to be less resistant less you get left behind.

Re:They're leaves.

[BlacKSacrificE]

Train; noun
plural noun: trains
1. a series of connected railway carriages or wagons moved by a locomotive or by integral motors.

Now that we have that out of the way, go look up "wagonways" c1500. There is evidence the greeks had rail based transport as well. The technology has indeed been around for a several centuries.

Re:They're leaves.

[jones_supa]

Why the 25kHz pulsing?

Re:They're leaves.

[Pinky's Brain]

If a smooth contact could clear the rails the breaking wheels would do it. Rotating bristles will wear an awful lot faster.

You'd need something akin to an assembly of hedge trimmers, so you can just keep spooling thread.

Re:They're leaves.

[Pinky's Brain]

Oops, I meant lawn trimmer.

Re:They're leaves.

[drainbramage]

So, the compression of the leaves turns them into a 'Super Hard Anti Reflective Coating'.
I feel better knowing that a SHARC is the target of a Laser this time.

Re:They're leaves.

[drinkypoo]

In games you pulse lasers because the laser is blocked and scattered by whatever you're vaporizing with it. I don't know anything useful, but that's my guess anyway :p

OK, OK, I will google, since you forgot how. You must be taking the wrong drugs, eh? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

(TL;DR: both what I said — battletech FTW — and also the technique is used to reduce heat while cutting. The goal is not to heat the rail...)

Re:They're leaves.

[AmiMoJo]

For high speed rail they use pantographs. They have to stagger them to keep wear even over their width.

Brushes are not suited to high speed rail because they are either ineffective or create too much drag at high speeds.

Re:They're leaves.

[AmiMoJo]

Do you really think that they didn't think of that issue? I'm guessing there is a clever solution, but like you I didn't RTFA.

Re:They're leaves.

[drinkypoo]

A "better" solution might be to eliminate the idea of "engine" cars which provide all the traction entirely — you keep them around, but they become "generator" cars. Motorize the bogeys, put some power storage underneath every car, put some smarts into every car, including the ability to shut off their air brake and decouple themselves so that individual cars can switch themselves out of moving trains. This spreads out all of the jobs the train does across all of the wheels on the train. Then you can not only do the sort of things you suggest here, but also simply won't have the same degree of trouble stopping in those conditions because every axle (well, probably every bogey, with the front and rear axle on each bogey tied together or with only one driven axle per bogey) will have its own anti-lock controller, perform its own traction control, manage its own regenerative braking, and so on.

I presume this would cost a shitload more than what we're doing now, but it seems like there are enough benefits to warrant it. I guess some subways work this way, and some don't? That's what I gathered last time I tried to read up on this subject.

Re: They're leaves.

[Applehu Akbar]

No, because a laser could eventually be scaled up to zap that F-150 some drunk parked on the grade crossing.

Re:They're leaves.

[RockDoctor]

Well played sir!

Your job in line-cleaning for BR (or whatever they're called since the unmitigated lunacy of breaking up the system) awaits. Free bucket of opprobrium included for the next time that the line-cleaning system fails to perform adequately. It won't be long before it fails - they never last long.

Re:They're leaves.

[iggymanz]

lasers are dangerous, a thousandth of the output power of that which could burn leaves could blind or damage the human eye if pointed at reflective surface such as say A RAILROAD RAIL.

you are funny talking about "evolution of tech" and my not being left behind. I've worked with lasers for decades, there is nothing new about burning things with a laser, I've done sintering and cutting of steel and soft tool alloys in the 90s for rapid prototyping

Re:They're leaves.

[Matheus]

I have a 1 W Laser (kinda super). Not *nearly powerful enough to vaporize leaves although I have lit a few cigarettes for people with it :-)

As for SWAT they leave me alone so long as I don't point aircraft with it...

Even if their wet?

[AltGrendel]

I would think that it'd take one heck of a laser to fry wet leaves on a train track. The whole thing sounds like a boondoggle to me.

Re:Even if their wet?

[MyLongNickName]

1) They're*
2) Dear God, people, attaching lasers to anything makes it epic cool. What the hell has happened to Slashdot?

Re:Even if their wet?

[jandrese]

I'm more worried that a laser powerful enough to evaporate a wet leaf in a fraction of a second is going to reflect off of the rails at other times, burning parallel lines in the roofs of tunnels, potentially burning holes in people who just happen to be walking over a crossbridge at the wrong time, or blinding pilots.

Re:Even if their wet?

[MyLongNickName]

I would think that any laser reflective off a metal rail would lose focus and be scatter far too much to burn a hole in anything. This is a gut feel though and not based on hard math.

Re:Even if their wet?

[SecurityGuy]

I had the same concern with the mosquito-zapping lasers, which IIRC are only around 40W (which is still a LOT). It's a really cool idea until someone throws an aluminum can in my yard and a reflected laser hits someone in the eye. I'd think the power required to burn leaves off would be a lot higher than the power required to warm up mosquitoes enough to kill them.

Re:Even if their wet?

[Jason Levine]

Could it also distort the rail itself? Probably not from one train passing over it, but once a few hundred trains zap the rails, it might distort just enough to cause problems.

Re:Even if their wet?

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like a forest fire to me...this is silly.

Re:Even if their wet?

[sconeu]

The real question is, of course, "Where did they find room to put the shark tank?"

Re:Even if their wet?

[sjames]

The rail will be well polished due to trains running over it. Because laser beams are coherent and well columnated to begin with, they will not likely diffuse nearly enough to make incidental exposure safe for humans.

Re:Even if their wet?

[sjames]

In other words, the rails will not diffuse the light sufficiently to render the reflected beam safe, just sufficiently to make incidental contact inevitable.

Re:Even if their wet?

[joe_frisch]

We need to test all the competing technologies for this to pick the best:

1) high power lasers.
2). Flame throwers
3). High power plasma discharges.
4). rocket-propelled Anti-leaf attack drones
5). Jets of ClF3
6) Anti-proton beams.
7). Brushes
8) US only: a guy walking ahead of the train with a broom.

then we can see which is the most cost effective and safe - and get some cool youtube videos as well.

Re:Even if their wet?

[antdude]

Young/New generation, perhaps?

Re:Even if their wet?

[sjames]

We may be reading past each other. I agree that the various reflected laser light will be harmful to human beings. The rail is sufficiently polished to reflect strongly yet sufficiently uneven that the reflected light will have a significant chance of hitting an unfortunate someone. Unlike a regular strong light that would scatter to the point of being harmless.

Re:Even if their wet?

[RandomAdam]

Just use 40 1W lasers and focus them on the offending bug!

Re:Even if their wet?

[Neil Boekend]

I see no reason not to encase the whole setup in steel, with half a cm between the case and the rail. Then next to all reflections will stay within that casing.

Re:Even if their wet?

[Neil Boekend]

From the article referenced in TFA:

This is because their wavelength of 1064 nanometres means they are absorbed by the leaves and other organic matter such as oil, but not by metal, so energy from the lasers is reflected off the rails.

Re:Even if their wet?

[Saint Fnordius]

I think the system would be dual-powered, with a sensor placed where the laser's reflection off of the rail would normally hit. Others have mentioned that there were already tests, where the leaf isn't incinerated so much as insta-dried and thus not so slimy. It would restrict speed, though, as the train could not travel faster than the speed of the laser leaf-dryer.

Umm...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Maybe I'm just a terrible person whose sense of childlike wonder and love of lasers has shriveled; but isn't 'clearing leaves' the sort of job where a simple nozzle blowing compressed air(turned on and off based on sensor input if it turns out that you can implement a sensor system at lower cost than just running the compressor a bit more often) at the track immediately in front of the wheels would be more than adequate for the purpose?

My understanding is that some trains even have a compressed air supply already(for pneumatic braking and sundry other duties), and all trains, since they have to move, are going to have a fairly burly supply of either mechanical or electrical energy to run a compressor. Much simpler and likely more durable than a laser and optics high-powered enough for debris clearing, and less likely to cause amusing track fires.

Am I missing something here, or did somebody just fail to KISS?

Re:Umm...

[jandrese]

I think the concern isn't dry leaves so much as wet ones that are plastered to the rail like decals on a middle school girl's notebook.

Re:Umm...

[jittles]

Maybe I'm just a terrible person whose sense of childlike wonder and love of lasers has shriveled; but isn't 'clearing leaves' the sort of job where a simple nozzle blowing compressed air(turned on and off based on sensor input if it turns out that you can implement a sensor system at lower cost than just running the compressor a bit more often) at the track immediately in front of the wheels would be more than adequate for the purpose?

You're missing the damage that compressed air / water does to the substrate of the track. It undermines the foundations of the line. They already do this, but it costs them more money to repair the line than it would if the leaves were just burnt on the spot.

Re:Umm...

[drinkypoo]

I think the concern isn't dry leaves so much as wet ones that are plastered to the rail like decals on a middle school girl's notebook.

An air jet reasonably close to the rail will blow stuff like that off in a tiny fraction of a second. Air's really good at that sort of thing, it blows the water out and then it can pick up the item, and it happens surprisingly fast. Too fast to see, kind of fast. What it won't blow off, though, is a leaf that partially decomposed and then glued itself to the rail. That ain't coming off of there. Burning it off with a laser probably would work OK, but it would also be more dangerous than an air jet. Both are dangerous, however! You should never use compressed air to blow chips (As in, metal chips) or shavings out of your clothing, or where there's any risk of same, because there's a good risk of having them lodge in your skin, or your eye. I wouldn't like to be next to the tracks when either technology was used.

Many trains have for many decades been equipped with sand blowers, they use compressed air to blow sand onto the rails in front of the wheels.

Fire

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait.. "puff of smoke" ? If the lasers are powerful enough to do that, what's keeping it from setting things on fire?

Re:Fire

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The material immediately below the leaf is going to be a steel rail, which takes some work to get burning; but this would seem to be a concern if the tracks have some leaves on them; but also leaves/brush/grass/trash/etc. gathered around the tracks themselves. Ablating a thin layer of leaf from a big chunk of steel isn't so bad; but you only have to get unlucky occasionally for bits of burning leaf to fall from the clearance site and land in something suitably tindery and start a decent little fire.

Re:Fire

[Jason Levine]

Not to mention that a speeding train tends to cause a wind gust. You could get a leaf slight burning by the laser, tossed around by the train's wind currents, and land in a bush or grassy area a few feet away. Drought + Laser Train = Trail of Fire.

Re:Fire

[Holi]

Why would they be using something that deals with "Wet" leaves in a drought?

Re:Fire

[geoskd]

Why would they be using something that deals with "Wet" leaves in a drought?

Two Words: Industrial Accident

Re:Fire

[DigiShaman]

This is why I'm in favor of hiring little gnomes that can sweep the tracks 25,000 times a second. And they're fast enough to avoid getting run over.

On a serious note: Are eddy current brakes (electromagnetic induction through the rails) not up to the task? Some trains already use them.

Calibration

[riverat1]

Seems like it would take some careful calibration to make a laser that would burn off wet leaves plastered to the rail and yet not soften the hardened steel of the rail that's going to have a multi-ton train passing over it in seconds.

Re:Calibration

[TubeSteak]

Seems like it would take some careful calibration to make a laser that would burn off wet leaves plastered to the rail and yet not soften the hardened steel of the rail that's going to have a multi-ton train passing over it in seconds.

If you RTFA, they use a laser wavelength that reflects off the steel instead of being absorbed.

Re:Calibration

[bigtrike]

Leaves burn well below the annealing temperature of most steels.

Re:Calibration

[Herve5]

I think the thermal inertia of a big metallic rail must be, say,10000 times the one of a tree leaf.
Or maybe 100 000 ?

Re:Calibration

[smellsofbikes]

Seems like it would take some careful calibration to make a laser that would burn off wet leaves plastered to the rail and yet not soften the hardened steel of the rail that's going to have a multi-ton train passing over it in seconds.

If I were doing this -- and I'm not claiming it's feasible, but let's call this a gedankenexperiment -- I'd use a system set up to ablate the material, which Wikipedia says so I don't have to: "Very short laser pulses remove material so quickly that the surrounding material absorbs very little heat, so laser drilling can be done on delicate or heat-sensitive materials," and " laser energy can be selectively absorbed by coatings, particularly on metal, so CO2 or Nd:YAG pulsed lasers can be used to clean surfaces, remove paint or coating, or prepare surfaces for painting without damaging the underlying surface. High power lasers clean a large spot with a single pulse."
When I was working with deep UV lasers (and got to learn what fluorine gas smells like -- elmer's glue, in case you were wondering, at least when it's dilute -- we were able to strip physical vapor deposition copper and nickel off polyimide film without damaging the polyimide. (We needed geometries too fine for chemical etching.) Removing organic material off steel should be much easier. Ablation can in theory remove single atomic layers with thermal damage only a few atoms deep to the underlying surface.

Re:Calibration

[smellsofbikes]

Sorry to reply to myself but since Wikipedia doesn't actually bother to talk about mechanisms, I will. You can remove a surface with a laser through heating, which applies enough photons to the surface atoms that they vibrate loose, which is a slow process that transmits piles of heat downwards. Or you can use a laser whose wavelength is shorter than the strength of the sigma electron bonds in the material, in which case the electrons absorb the photons, get popped into a higher orbital, and the bond that held the two atoms together simply isn't there anymore and the now free atoms can just drift away. There is in theory no heat generated at all. In practice there are so many photons coming in all at once that there's a metric buttload of photons being absorbed by everything, so what actually happens is the wavefront hits and turns the first couple of atomic layers into a plasma, that erupts away from the surface and leaves the underlying surface close to untouched. So that's the mechanistic difference between burning and ablation: photon flux and wavelength.

Re:Calibration

[amicusNYCL]

Ablation can in theory remove single atomic layers with thermal damage only a few atoms deep to the underlying surface.

So the damage to the surface is only a few times larger than what was removed?

Re:Calibration

[riverat1]

RTFA? This is /. Why would I break tradition and do that?

Re:Calibration

[smellsofbikes]

Ablation can in theory remove single atomic layers with thermal damage only a few atoms deep to the underlying surface.

So the damage to the surface is only a few times larger than what was removed?

The damage is only a few atomic layers deep, more or less independent of how much material is removed.
A large limitation to how much you can remove is that you build this huge largely opaque cloud of debris blasting off the surface of the material so you can't get new photons into the surface anymore, but you can peel stuff off a few atoms in a burst or a few dozens of micrometers in a burst, with the same very thin heat affected zone at the surface. (Another is that all the stuff you just blasted off immediately sticks to the front of your objective lens, but they don't last long anyway when you have this many photons going through them: objective mirrors last longer but still get covered in junk. Some interesting stuff being done using liquid waveguides through which the laser moves and which wash off the debris, but then you have to not vaporize/ablate your liquid waveguide. And at least with the UV stuff we were doing, even the atmosphere absorbed giant amounts of the energy, so we had to do it in a vacuum and that made the crap-sticking-to-the-lens problem even worse.) My recollection is that people were trying to use laser ablation to do extremely thin heat-treatment, like surfacing treatment, but couldn't actually get it thick enough to make a measurable difference in wear characteristics, but A: I may misremember and B: people may be better at this now, so that bit could be complete hooey. I got out of high-energy lasers like fifteen years ago, when I realized that fully half my coworkers had pie blindness: they'd managed to damage some part of their eyes so they were missing some of their visual area, and stuff may have progressed a lot since then.

Popular trife...

[MindPrison]

"Trains May Soon Come Equipped With Debris-Zapping Lasers"

The lovely word "may" is such an abused word. There are MANY things that MAY come, on the other hand it MIGHT not as well. My money is on that it won't be here anytime soon. There are so many technical and impractical issues that arise, that this is nothing more than a "wow...lasers, we're so 1337" 21 century etc. Sure, it makes for a good read, and even better...the house-geek will have his say over the dinner table...say...did you know honey, they're putting lasers in front of the trains now to clear the tracks. OOOOh honey, that's just up your Dart Vader alley!

Guess what? I've been working with technology and prototyping for years, and it's a riot every time this actually surfaces as an article once in a blue moon, you can't just put high power lasers in front of trains, you'll have reflection issues, IR-radiation, people claiming blindness, and the kind of power you need to "zap" it clean is extreme, this isn't your average laser pointer that can be used to write your name into a cellphone or pop balloons, heck...even hefty industrial lasers used to cut metal are so focused and concentrated that if you wanted to use it to blast away debris...you'd need a HECK of a lot more space for it to be actually practical, not to mention the need for cooling.

Re:Popular trife...

[Bodhammer]

wow, talk about a buzz kill...

Re:Popular trife...

[tompaulco]

OK, how about "Trains May Soon Come Equipped With Invisible Pink Unicorns"? Just as likely, and yet much more cuddly.

Re:Popular trife...

[Aighearach]

... Invisible Pink Unicorns ...

My country has these already! You can see them ... Oh, wait.

... if you believe!

Re:Popular trife...

[riverat1]

In the /. meme world wouldn't it be "Trains May Soon Come Equipped With Sharks"?

Re:Popular trife...

[drinkypoo]

the practical issues of making it happen are the least of the concerns, trains are stupid big and have huge amounts of available power, and they can afford to carry a cooling system for a laser. it's all about the safety issues, which you also mentioned :)

Is Dr. Evil Behind This?

[8127972]

As it really sounds like he's moved on from the idea of sharks with frickin' laser beams.

Re:Is Dr. Evil Behind This?

[Jason Levine]

Only if the trains are shark shaped and if the project will cost *pinky finger to mouth* one MILLION dollars!

Laser Mounted Trains

[byteherder]

First sharks, and now this....

Can they make the trains look like sharks?

[Bodhammer]

Just askin'...

Lighting fires in front of a train

[grimmjeeper]

What could possibly go wrong?

/. = HACKED (READ ALL ABOUT IT)

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

Maybe this will bring back trains in the US

[robstout]

"We should take the train. It's mor efficient than a car, and we don't nee dot worry about parking" "Nah" "Did I mention the lasers?" "Count me in!"

Trains today...

[halivar]

Sharks tomorrow.

This should be interesting

[GameboyRMH]

Is this what trains will sound like in the future?

Everything needs laser beams

[P3r1$c0p3]

I am very disappointed at the slashdoters that are saying trains with lasers are a bad idea. Compressed air over lasers? Mr. Spock should have carried duster canned air on all of those away missions. Dr. Evil should have had sharks with compressed air tanks. That would have been way more interesting.

Suicide

[MouseR]

by fricking trains with lasers beams attached to their heads.

The Netherlands.

[pahles]

It's called the Netherlands. How difficult can it be?

Re:The Netherlands.

[sconeu]

The Netherlands? Now it all becomes clear.

There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch.

Re:The Netherlands.

[pahles]

You mean the Dutch who are so intolerant to intolerance, the intolerant are taking over?

Re:The Netherlands.

[Neil Boekend]

Maybe he is from Noord or Zuid Holland.

Re:The Netherlands.

[sconeu]

Sigh... nobody remembers Nigel Powers?

Trains May Soon Come Equipped With Debris-Zapping

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Trains May Soon Come Equipped With Debris-Zapping Lasers
That is... frickin awesome! How do I get a ticket? Can I work the laser?

Not quite a proof-of-concept

[userw014]

The video shows some kind of wide laser projector about a centimeter or so above a test-rig, with sparks flaring off, and the rail moving at a (relatively) slow rate - perhaps one or two Kph.

If the sparks were only burnt excess "leaf material", that isn't a problem - but if it's rust or steel fragments burning up, that's material coming off of the rails - in effect, wear.

If this is intended to be used continuously while the train is in motion in order to keep the rails clear of debris, how much energy can be delivered to a leaf from a fixed projector moving at 50Kph? If this does deliver enough power to cause the leave to disappear in a puff-of-smoke, isn't there a chance of heating the surface of the rail enough for the carbon ashes pressed into the rail by the subsequent advance of the train to chemically react with the rail?

This might be ok for single layers of leaves - but how long does it take for multiple layers of leaves to build up on a rail?

If the huge amount of leaves in the video is characteristic of the problem they want to solve, won't the wind from the passage of any train moving at speed just redistribute more leaves on the rails behind it?

Re:For Hobos and teenagers

[smooth wombat]

Considering we just had an Eagle Scout get plastered by a train, I don't think lasers will do any better of a job.

Lasers should be rotated by 90 degree angle

[Trachman]

Trains have more than 150 years of history of operations and the typical issues that the regular people hear about the trains is cost to tax payers. Remember the LIRR (Long Island Railway) scandal where 80% of retirees chose to be disabled and are drawing disability pensions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... , section "Pension and disability fraud scandal".

Railroad companies know how to handle snow and and dirt.

However, everyone here should talk to their friend policeman, fireman or ambulance worker and ask them what they think about railroads. They will tell you that the most frustrating thing about the railways is the suicides. Those (and I appologize for my language here) pussies who do not want to die home alone using tried and proven methods, without causing stres. Upon Rairoad suicide attempt, railway schedules gets disrupted, tens of thousands of commuters get stranded, service people need to collect remnants of people who leave the world in a "spectacular" way.

As such, rather than using superpowerful lasers to zap the leaves and dirts, it is a much better idea to rotate them by a 90 degree angle and to fry all those attention seekers. Lasers will cause pain and will give time to the attempters to change their mind.

Re:Lasers should be rotated by 90 degree angle

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't jump in front of trains for attention. Actual suicides aren't done for attention. Jumping in front of a train is (falsely) considered a sure way to kill yourself. And I wouldn't call someone who's been living in hell for years and finally decides to end it a pussy. Misguided yes, but defiantly not a coward. Killing yourself takes a lot of courage.

Not exactly a new idea

[Kjella]

Here's an article talking about the same from 2002. Apparently there's rather low tech mechanical solutions that work quite well. Kinda like the laser potato peeler, still waiting for that and my flying car.

frickin' laser beams

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have trains with frickin' laser beams attached

whee

[argStyopa]

If I find out which trains have this, I'm so going to post a youtube of a chipmunk or gopher on the track. He might have accidentally wandered onto a patch of duct tape.

Anyway, yeah in seriousness this sounds like nonsense.

No longer safe.

[Snufu]

Note: Due to lasers, it is no longer safe to lye on the rails in front of oncoming trains.

Re:No longer safe.

[iggymanz]

how about mild detergents instead of lye, would that be safe?

Re:No longer safe.

[LessThanObvious]

Yes, but it will be safer for damsels in distress who get tied to railroad tracks. Laser, cuts rope, Superman can relax.

Laser those rascals...

[__aaclcg7560]

When I took Amtrak to visit my parents in Sacramento in the 1990's, the kids in Oakland would put debris on the track to see what would happen when the train comes though at 65MPH. I don't mean a penny. Debris broke the brake airhose on the carriage underneath my seat on one trip. The trian slowed to a stop. The engineer spent 15 minutes repairing the airhose. Lasers should vaporize those little rascals off the track.

Technology adaptation

[Anonymous Coward]

About a decade ago the Brits had a slew of leaves-on-the tracks failure-to-brake accidents. Why now? everyone thought. In a bunch of places the embankments had been designed for coal-burning trains, which spit sparks, so the embankments were gravelled or very sparsely grassed. What trees the fires didn't suppress were cut down as seedlings every few years.

Time passes, the engines change fuel, someone notices they're spending money on maintaining the gravel and stops.

*Decades* pass and there are beautiful trees on the embankments tall enough to shed onto the tracks -- *that's* when the accidents start.

Re:Zebra zapping

[PPH]

IOW, bar code readers.

Re:Slashdot gets hacked

[PPH]

top websites - including Slashdot,

My sides!

How do you not fry people's eyes?

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Laser laboratories take rather elaborate precautions to avoid having a laser beam go into someone's eye. If there's much power in the laser, having it hit someone's eye is VERY bad--blindness can result. (And post signs that say 'do not look into laser with remaining eye'.)

Do we really want high power laser beams possibly bouncing off shiny rails going who knows where, where some poor bastard might be looking the wrong way?

I mean, even if these lasers aren't in the visible range, I still don't want a beam in my eye.

Re:How do you not fry people's eyes?

[Neil Boekend]

Assuming they are sane they will place a steel plate or similar in the path of the reflections. Perhaps even a box around the laser & part of the track to prevent those exact reflections.

Road or rode?

[Roger W Moore]

gee I hope the third rail contacts on the electrical train I road to work don't hear you

If you 'road' your train then wearing down your third rail is not really an issue...the screaming pedestrians and motorists trying to get our of your way might be a bigger problem though.

No sharks?

[Starport]

cant be right!