Painting the sides of railroad rails white to reduce derailment

dnemmers

Reducing derailment by decreasing track movement by painting the does of the track white, to reflect heat absorbed from the sun.

atourgates

In a somewhat related practice, some roads in the Tour de France this year have been painted with "white shit" (rider Tom Pidcock's words) in order to combat the asphalt melting in the heat, with the unfortunate side-effect that it seems to be slippery and several riders (including Tom Pidcock) crashed going around a corner when the lost traction. Coverage here: https://velo.outsideonline.com/road/road-racing/tour-de-fran... But of course, this was done in response to past serious crashes that occured because the asphalt melted. So, it's sort of a damned if you do damned if you dont scenario for the organizers.

jeffrallen

Practical Engineering already explained the correct solution to this problem: https://youtu.be/zqmOSMAtadc?si=UUlmnk9sI-leq0SV But of course, American infrastructure was built on the cheap, and is not maintained correctly. This is why we can't have nice things.

kylehotchkiss

I love a simple solution to billion dollar problems

amiga386

At least they're doing something. I couldn't believe the state of US railtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI Just go slower! We don't want to pay for maintenance. What's the worst that could happen? You derail and your toxic payload catches fire and poisons the neighbourhood? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio,_train_de...

tiagod

"That’s huge. If you’re not fighting the sun’s heat, you dramatically reduce the risk of the rail shifting.” Am I misreading or does this say the opposite of what they meant?

acyou

Paint everything white! Why stop at rails? Mostly because it doesn't stay white and looks bad. But it doesn't stop people from painting their siding white, for example. Why paint the sides of the rails? Well you can paint the tops, but it tends to gum up the wheels and get worn off. You want a paint with high reflectivity and high emissivity. Just be sure you aren't using infrared light temp measurement as to measure and make claims about differences in temperature, emissivity is something to watch out for when measuring temperature in that way. 20 degrees is surprising, I sure wish my car was white in the summer. I wonder if you have okay effects with white rails in the winter?

dupontcyborg

this isn’t the point of the story, but is that paint truck driving on the railroad tracks?

kazinator

> Union Pacific Is Tackling Rail Heat to Keep America’s Freight on Track Someone talked to an LLM which convinced them they had a brilliant idea. Just a guess ...

kelseyfrog

You can literally buy derailers[1]. People will find away around this, making white paint useless. Engineers need to engineer. 1. https://www.aldonco.com/product-category/derails/

vivzkestrel

- maybe consider electrifying the entire freight network of the USA like some of the other countries have done (mind you very large countries) - then you might not have to worry increasing heat levels that much