Trains

While the inspection of railway tracks is an important task, such inspections have to be performed when no trains are nearby. The new rail-riding Staaker BG-300 Railway Drone offers an alternative, as it just flies off the tracks as trains approach.

China has produced the first of a new breed of maglev trains capable of speeds up to 600 km/h, or nearly half the speed of sound. It says these will be the fastest ground transport services available on the planet.

As it eyes the future of sustainable transport through the development of advanced batteries and hydrogen fuel cell technologies, General Motors is now expanding these ambitions to include the world of freight.

Rail technology company Wabtec has demonstrated a new form of electric train technology that could help lessen the environmental footprint of heavy-haul freight services, reducing fuel consumption of an entire train by 11 percent in an early pilot.

Earlier in the year, LG Display showed its vision for the aircraft cabin of the future, which included transparent OLED partitions. Now the company has installed the technology in subway train windows.

The first solar farm to provide power to a railway line in the UK was switched on today by Riding Sunbeams, 10:10, Community Energy South and Network Rail.

Researchers at EPFL have crunched the numbers on heat transfer in the air of train tunnels, and outlined a geothermal heat recovery system that could potentially supply heating and cooling to thousands of nearby homes.

High-profile British firm Foster + Partners recently completed work on a network of train stations in Saudi Arabia. Providing high-speed links between four cities, the buildings are designed to keep visitors at a relatively comfortable temperature even during the scorching summer heat.

This train car is over 70 years old and has an interesting history that includes it being used during World War II and the Cold War. Now installed on some rural land in Maryville, Tennessee, it has been painstakingly renovated into a guest house and is available to rent on Airbnb.

Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), working with local firm A_Lab, has won an architecture competition to design two stations for a new metro line planned for Oslo, Norway. Construction on the line is due to begin in 2020 and the stations are expected to be completed by 2025.

Snøhetta and Dialog drew inspiration from local Chinook cloud arch formations when designing Canada's Calgary Central Library. The building is situated in a very challenging plot that incorporates an existing light rail track and wows visitors with an eye-catching timber-lined atrium.

The world's first hydrogen fuel cell-powered train has entered regular service in Germany with a two-car Alstom Coradia iLint taking to the tracks on Eisenbahnen und Verkehrsbetriebe Elbe-Weser's (EVB) Elbe-Weser network in Lower Saxony.