Place PV between and on railway tracks — removable panels or solar sleepers
#00143
Lay PV in the gap between rails (removable panels, e.g. Sun-Ways) or integrate cells into replacement sleepers (e.g. Greenrail), reusing sealed rail corridors without new land. More promising than road-surface PV because trains pass intermittently rather than braking and grinding
Bankset Energy tested sleeper-clip PV panels at Deutsche Bahn's Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) test field, claiming ~0.1 MW per km and announcing 200 MW across 1,000 km in Saxony in 2018. No independent verification of the…
The "solar sleeper" variant of the rail PV concept: Greenrail integrates PV cells into replacement sleepers cast partly from recycled tyres and plastic (~35 t of waste repurposed per km), so the sleeper itself generates…
The first removable inter-rail PV system on a line open to traffic. In April 2025, Sun-Ways installed 48 panels (~18 kW) along a 100 m active stretch near Buttes, Neuchâtel, using a Scheuchzer track machine that unrolls…