DaPorkchop_ [they/she/it]

this is horrific, i love it so much and want to build one myself now

That’s like 1/7th of the cost of a single passenger car. I’m sure they can easily afford to take that hit if it doesn’t end up panning out.

Because none of that unused land is set up to allow a machine to easily roll over it and automatically place/replace/clean the panels. Putting panels between the tracks means you get that for free, as the tracks are there anyway, and are already have electrical infrastructure all along their length.

The point of the experiment is to see if those benefits end up outweighing the presumably higher chance of panels getting damaged. In the worst case it ends up not being worth while and there isn’t a huge loss, in the best case we end up being able to add a bunch of additional solar capacity without having to build much new infrastructure or cover any previously unused land.

And it would be trivially easy to have a train run over the tracks to clean the panels, there are already trains which use compressed air/sandblasters/lasers to remove leaves and stuff from the rails. Just add a few more compressed air nozzles in between and boom, all your panels are now clean.

This is Switzerland, outside of a small number of corridors the majority of tracks see virtually nothing but passenger trains.