On a stretch of track near the village of Buttes in western Switzerland, trains have spent the past year rolling over something new: 48 solar panels laid snugly between the rails by the startup Sun-Ways. The panels are installed and removed quickly by a purpose built machine, so track maintenance carries on as normal, and they wear filters to stop glare, with brushes mounted on passing trains to sweep them clean. More than 11,000 trains later, the verdict is in: the installation stayed perfectly stable and safe.
In its first year the little power plant produced around 16,000 kilowatt hours, roughly a household's annual electricity, all fed into the local grid, and the company is now working on sending future power straight to railway substations and even to the trains themselves. Italy is already lining up to host the next pilot with its national rail infrastructure operator. The prize is enormous: the world has hundreds of thousands of kilometres of track sitting idle in the sun, and every metre of it could one day be quietly making clean power without claiming a single field.
Our short take: the full story is by Liam Gilliver for Euronews.