15/10/2026
Class
In Switzerland, engineers at startup Sun-Ways have found a brilliant way to generate solar energy without sacrificing a single acre of farmland or forest: unrolling a removable carpet of solar panels directly between the steel rails of active train tracks.
Instead of bolting panels down by hand, a custom-built railway maintenance train uses a giant mechanical piston system to lay up to 1,000 square meters of pre-assembled photovoltaic panels per day as it rolls along the line.
Whenever railway crews need to grind the rails or tamp the gravel ballast underneath, the same train simply rolls back through and winds the solar carpet back up like a scroll — while cylindrical rotary brushes attached to passing trains keep the anti-glare glass panels clean.
Across Switzerland’s 3,300-mile rail network alone, utilizing the empty space between tracks could generate over 1 terawatt-hour of clean electricity annually — enough to power nearly a third of the nation’s public transit system.
With over 700,000 miles of railway tracks already laid across the globe, turning existing rail corridors into linear solar power plants could become one of the fastest land-free energy upgrades in history.
