It's been awhile since I shared a Postcard from a Solarpunk Future. I've been working on a fiction project which kind of got away from me in scope and scale - you can read a bit more about it here if you're interested. That said, it's nearly complete so I thought I'd share a mostly-standalone photobash from the interior art.
This one is from the beginning of the story, it shows an electric railbus traveling along an old rail causeway in a rural area. It's modeled on an Ecuadorian autoferro and it has a pantograph it's not currently using - I'll get to why in a bit.
The area I grew up in is crisscrossed with inactive train lines. These former short lines transported passengers and cargo and interlinked small, dense towns and villages for almost a hundred years.
The tracks, bridges, causeways, crossings, and right-of-ways are mostly intact but none of them have seen use since around 1970. Many are being converted to bike paths, though the local railcar clubs are keeping some of the tracks intact.
Getting into solarpunk has revived some of my childhood fascination with trains, and I routinely imagine a world where my hometowns' short lines are back in service and I can ride trains all the way from the major city where I live to the small towns where I grew up.
For now I accept that it's unrealistic, not for just logistical reasons but cultural ones. The car is so entrenched that most people in the region genuinely can't live without it. Their homes (most built since the 1940s) are spread out in a way that public transportation can't reasonably serve, and located at least a half hour's drive from most of the things they need. And too many people up there seem to believe that all public services (except repaving the roads almost annually) must somehow turn a profit. Abutters to the tracks would squack about noise and the whole thing would spend decades hung up in planning board meetings.
But in this fictional setting car infrastructure already collapsed decades ago, when war and societal crumbles broke the long, fragile supply chains that produced fuel, new vehicles, and replacement parts. Rural exurbs (bedroom communities where people live but don't work) are really only practical when perched at the very end of long, quick, plentiful supply chains. They're a modern invention. Historically, people here lived in a very different layout - the towns and villages were much denser, the land in between was clearcut for farming or left as wild habitat (though there was a lot less of this than I would have liked). People lived near their work.
I think that's both a more practical arrangement and a likely way things would reshape once the supply chains start to break down. I've written about this elsewhere a few times.
The important thing is that they're at a point where it makes sense to return these old tracks to service. As for what they'd use, I'd planned on a self-propelled railcar, but after talking to railfans on reddit.com/r/trains and lemmy.ml/c/trains I decided on a railbus. Specifically, an old electric bus converted to rail service.
Historically self-propelled railcars and railbuses were the last gasp of struggling railroads in low-traffic areas. They cost less to operate because they were smaller than a full locomotive, and were often easier to maintain. Because traffic was low they were still able to meet demand, and many railroads eked out decades running these machines on some lines.
I figure that the same features that make them appealing in those circumstances probably work in reverse. A collection of denser, rebuilding towns looking at a crumbling road network and the comparatively cheap cost of fixing the train tracks enough for light service might decide to start small, using a common old vehicle they could more easily salvage replacement parts for.
As for the pantograph rig, since this is a pretty ad-hoc rebuilding effort, I imagine overhead wires are another thing that are still in-progress, and each town or village has set up overhead cantenaries extending out as far as they can manage. In the long spans in between, the bus uses its batteries, and likely still has to stop and recharge at the end of its route. litchralee@sh.itjust.works was a huge help in figuring out if this could work and under what circumstances.
As with most of the postcards, I really like to focus on these in-progress glimpses of a recovering future. Looking for better, rather than perfect. This image, like all the postcards, is CC-BY, use it how you like.
