Overhead Catenary Cables to Charge Electric Lorries.

It's quite a problem to work with 2 overhead wires. Some experiments were made with direct 3 phase traction in the early days of railways using two wires. The gap between the wires must be greater than the width of the pantograph which restricts the width of the pick up head and hence the allowable amount of sideways deviation. The trolley bus type solution is only suitable for relatively low speeds.

Would it be better to use multimodal containers so you can gain the benefit of low friction steel wheels on steel rails for the long haul part and use electric trucks for the last 5-10km?


Best regards


Roger

well on heavily used routes to  charge on board batteries provide and traction current without having to stop, maybe. But there is far more height variation in lorries than there is in trains, and on a busy road, you'd need a lot more power stations per km than you do on a railway. 

A loaded train may be half a dozen megawatts, and on average there will be a few km  between them, while on the M25 for example , each truck would be no more than  100m from the next, probably quite a bit less, and motor size of perhaps 10kW per tonne of GMW. So even for small lorries like 7.5 tonnes, we might think of 70-80kW, and upto half a megawatt for the 44 tonne artics - and that assumes just traction, not charging up the on board batteries at the same time. Even if we dare re-use the train voltage of 25kV RMS, we would have  a lot of amps to think of.

Sounds horrendously expensive to me.  Trolleybuses worked because buses only followed limited routes.  Trolley trucks would still need big batteries for when they are on minor roads.  It would be cheaper to install fast charging stations at every truck stop.