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Railway cables overpowered errant drone's compass and flung it back to terra firma

hoola Silver badge

That is most likely a transition to underground cable so that it does not offend all the pesky building owners. It is interesting that in North Wales they are now burying some HV cables to remove pylons from the landscape.

The 3rd Rail trains are crazy as they convert the DC to AC and step up so they can then use a chopper type controller and the some gear as the 25KV overhead. That is way they make such a racket when they pull out of the station. When is was a kid (we had BR Southern Region in green pain) the trains all sounded like milk floats as the controller was nothing more than a series of giant resistors and some sort of switch to provide power control. You could often hear the bang as the driver took the power off and the contact dropped out. For all its critics, 3rd rail is very robust and presents far fewer problems than overhead, mainly because it is a dirty great rail rather than a flimsy bit of cable. It can ice up buy usually by that stage everything has stopped anyway.

I believe that there are speed limitations that preclude much more than 100mph running.

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