I’d change that to “in Sydney where tramway overhead is built like a mainline railway”. Gold Coast and Canberra don’t have the grossly overbuilt overhead Sydney has with double wire, complete with ratchet tensioners, over every crossover and siding. I was looking at the mess of excess poles and wire at the corner of Eddy Ave and Chalmers St the other day, and really looks like a pole and wire salesman’s dream deal, sold to rubes who don’t have a clue.
Even compared to the IWLR overhead, which I regard as overbuilt, the traction poles are twice as thick and there are twice the number.
As for Newcastle, I wouldn’t say it looks “nice” without wire, to me it looks unfinished. And given the obvious deficiencies becoming apparent even in test operation, I reckon, like George St, the eventual installation of overhead wire is inevitable at some point. Newcastle probably before George St as at least George St has continuous power supply with APS, though that might change with a bit of heavy rain. Newcastle has feeders in place to the charging points so stringing wire and replacing the centre light poles with traction poles. I said before that no-one would notice and only the most anally fixated anti-wire neurotics would care.
And now that Parramatta is intended to have this no-wire stupidity as well, I hope that the technical problems being exposed with this bogus setup in Newcastle will cause a rethink about imposing the same solution-in-search-of-a-problem on the Parramatta operation.
Time for some clear thinking based on engineering rather than this idiot idea from a gimmick catalogue. As I’ve also said before, the loudest whingers about overhead on tramways have no problem with massive concrete road overpasses because they are anti tramway in the first place, so using these inferior power supply systems - batteries, supercaps or APS - is just surrendering and pandering to the same idiot mentality that destroyed Wellington’s trolleybus system.
Tony
> On 10 Feb 2019, at 9:44 am, Prescott lenkaprescott@...> wrote:
>
> I would add that it looks nice without overhead wiring, but only because it's in Australia where tramway overhead is built like a mainline railway and is ugly as hell. The funniest thing looking at distance shots is that it won't be difficult in Newcastle to see where the nearest tram stop is - you just look for the rabbit ears sticking into the sky! I wonder how long before a driver misses his position and gets the pantograph tangled in the recharge bar. Let's hope in-motion charging catches on eventually in Australia, when they can untie themselves from total reliance on one supplier.
>
> Tony P
>
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