Rail Yard Lighting and Energy Conservation
By: Lance Winslow
Most of the things we import and export in our nation use trains to get at least part of the way there. Giant coal cars leave Gillette, WY headed for our nations power plants. Railcars filled with sugar beats leave Central Valley California, while petroleum products leave Houston headed to market. So much of our nations freight gets to us by train. Some of the Rail yards are huge, thousands of acres and security and lighting is paramount.
The costs to light up an entire rail yard can run in the millions per year. In fact many rail yards are not well lit, due to cost savings, making them potential targets for International Terrorists or potential areas for crime. We have all heard the stories of dead bodies being dumped at rail yards. We can deter crime in these areas by increasing the lighting and security cameras and running them of the vibrational energy of the rail cars on the tracks and the rumble of the locomotives. And the energy is free, as it has already been paid for in overcoming the friction that made it thru the powerful locomotive engines. We must collect this energy and turn it into light. How so you ask?
By placing hundreds of large sandwich sheets with a taunt film on the vibrational side and small copper lined tubes inside of them. Hundreds of tubes in each sheet running perpendicular with magnets inside them bouncing back and forth. These magnets will charge a capacitor and be hooked up to an LED lighting system using fiber optics or reflectors, each one hooked up to a .2 to .5 watt light. With hundreds of thousands of lights hooked up in a composite, like the eye of an insect, format they will light up the entire rail yard and since the lights can shine down on the track in the direction of traffic it would be like daylight without the light pollution associated with lights in large cities.
Currently this technology is being used in those little flashlights you see advertised on television that you shake and they light, but you never need batteries. This idea of lighting up the rail yards is using that technology on a larger scale with miniaturized parts making up the guts between the sandwich sheets. Let there be light, thru vibrational energy and there was. Think on it.
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