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Train bearings are greased with grease guns like a lot of things, and you tell when it's full by when grease shoots out. The reason there's room for grease to fill a bearing before it finally shoots out during maintenance (since it had to do that the last time it was greased) is by slowly losing grease over time just due to things moving and seals not being perfect. Multiply that by hundreds of axles each with two bearings, and 8-15 trains per day per direction.
I get that, it must be something to consider, as well as just general dirt and other pollutants. But is that grease loss over the rails primarily or thrown everywhere? Someone who works the rails might know just from experience. Or the first run of this would have noted the problem, and maybe it wasn't anything different than any other solar panel and what crap they pick up regardless of where they are. But ground level is about as easy access for cleaning as you can get.
From what I know it should be within the rails since that's where the roller bearings are and the underside of rolling stock is coated with a constant film of rust and grease.
Cleaning wouldn't be too hard especially if you made a train that carried its own water tanks and pressure washer spray. The downside is needing to take up a slot of revenue service to run a washing train. Putting more maintenance inside of the revenue generating part of a permanent way is pants on head regarded in my opinion. Like OOP said, put them next to the permanent way since the right of way usually is big enough you can do that.
There's also the fact that railhead grinders probably don't work with these in place which wears the rails out faster if you can't grind it (we're talking an order of magnitude faster if you don't grind microfractures or microcracking out), or necessitates removing them so you can regrind the rail head profile and delete micro cracking from fatigue cycling before it spreads and the entire rail needs to be replaced. Then you have to put these panels back in place.
In a normal rail setup you can run a grinding train in between revenue trains. With this you probably need to close the track, set up derails, remove panels with a crew, grind the rails, and put them back. Each step in that process is a crew day as opposed to a grinding train.
That makes sense. Wonder how much of that was considered in the test runs. Often times some of these green projects like to leave out the extras to pad their worth. At least this makes more sense than solar roads, which have so much more issues to deal with in wear and tear, even though the real estate is huge.