Re: Pantographs (was Re: MBTA BREDA Light Rail Cars)

[wauer@qspr03.tuwien.ac.at (Wolfgang Auer)]

Dear David, Dear Group,

David McLoughlin wrote:

>Melbourne in Australia is in the final stages of converting its large
>tramway (streetcar) system from trolleypoles to pans. They are
>single-arm pans, one to a tram. It seems there is a resulting problem
>with pans breaking or bending over, causing major delays in services. 
>[...]
>Most of the European trams which use single-arm pans are
>single-ended trams which use loops to turn. 

O. k., but there are even single-ended trams with the pantograph
mounted in an orientation one would usually considered "wrong" at the
first glance. Bremen, the city with the first 100% low floor prototype
worldwide, uses a scheme like


   /
 __\_____________
|              | \
|--------------+~| 
|________________/
  UU    UU    UU

-------------------> operating direction

>Are there any cities where trams/streetcars are double-ended and use
>single-arm pans that don't have this problem of pantograph-fouling?

Well, here you are a few German examples:

Jena, Mainz, Frankfurt/Main (Frankford), Köln (Cologne), Bonn,
Karlsruhe, Essen, Mülheim, Düsseldorf, Krefeld, Duisburg, Hannover,
Bielefeld, Saarbrücken, Heidelberg, Dresden.

And I didn't hear of any city with significant pantograph-fouling
recently.

>Melbourne's trams are all double-ended as there are no turning loops...

By the way, an extremely remarkable aspect of the largest tram system
in the formerly western hemisphere...

Best regards from Vienna with single-arm pantographs for decades,
Wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang Auer --------------------------------- ohne AUTO doppelt MOBIL
http://qspr03.tuwien.ac.at/~wauer/ --- mailto:wauer@qspr03.tuwien.ac.at