Lightning strikes moving train in Japan

[gmat]

From Japan Today, video included. Odakyu Line train, after crossing the Tama River and approaching Noborito Station. Looking Northwards toward the station.

 

http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/lightning-strikes-moving-train-in-japan

 

 

Best wishes,

Grant

 

 

[Ronny]

amazing, go to 1 min & 15 sec.

[ToniBabelony]

Whew! That's a place I pass through at least a few times per month (plus it has a nice little cheap izakaya). Does anybody know how it affected operations? I'm at the moment too lazy to research it... :P

[Martijn Meerts]

Now... How to scale this down by a factor of around 150-160 and add it to the layout? =)

[bill937ca]

It shouldn't affect the train, they are designed to withstand this.  Traction equipment using overhead wires include two separate devices: a lighting resistor and a choke coil. A choke coil consists of twelve or fourteen turns of heavy wire which is wound around a wooden core. The lighting arrestor is a heavy duty insulated capacitor which is connected to the current collector terminal of the choke coil on one side and to an electrical ground on the other side.

 

When lightning (an intense pulse of AC electricity) enters the electrical system via the current collector it encounters the choke coil. Owing to its high AC inductance, the coil will "buck" the electricity and send it through the arrestor, which has little resistance to AC but a very high resistance to DC. Upon entering the arrestor, AC electricity takes the shortest route to the ground via a wire connected to the car underframe and truck.

 

Information source: Running Point, OPT, 1993

Edited August 14, 2013 by bill937ca

[Densha]

But what if you're walking over a railway crossing and touching the railway track with your feet/shoes at the same time?? D:

[Mudkip Orange]

Well for one thing, your shoes are almost certainly made of an insulator (rubber, cork, leather). For another thing, whatever you're stepping on besides the rail is directly adjacent to the rail. There's less resistance for electricity to go from, say, railroad rails into dirt, then from railroad rails up into your foot and thence into dirt. Finally, most all railroad lines will have grounding rods periodically installed which are sunk deep into the ground and then electrically connected to the rails. The idea is to provide a path of least resistance that will avoid any trackside electronics (e.g. signaling equipment).

[Ochanomizu]

Hello,

 

This is a freeze frame image from 1:20.

 

 

 

[TestudoToTetsudo]

Now... How to scale this down by a factor of around 150-160 and add it to the layout? =)

 

A switch that engages a strobe light for a flash then cuts out all the lights in the room?

[TestudoToTetsudo]

This seemed to be all over the news in the US today.

 

I do wonder what the impact to service was.  I was once on a (diesel, non-MU) commuter train here in the US that got struck by lightning.  Fried the head end power unit (lights and air conditioning in the train), went into the track and fried the signals.  After about 20 minutes the engineer was able to get motive power back up again and we crawled at restricted speed (15 MPH/about 25kph) the rest of the way home with no interior lights and no air conditioning or other on board power.  Must be worse on an EMU.

Edited August 16, 2013 by TestudoToTetsudo

[westfalen]

I'm sure the line would be out of action for a time while the overhead was checked for damage at the very least.  From the video it looks like the interior lights have gone out indicating that at least some circuit breakers on the train or overhead system have tripped.