Switzerland just buried solar panels under a live train track to get clean energy

Right now, trains are rolling over solar panels somewhere in western Switzerland, and nobody had to chop down a forest or pave over a farm to make it happen.

A Swiss startup called Sun-Ways commissioned what might be the most unusual solar installation in the world on April 24, 2025. Today, 48 photovoltaic panels sit flush between the rails on a 100-meter stretch of active railway near the village of Buttes, low enough that trains pass directly overhead without slowing down. The panels are also completely removable. Maintenance crews can pull them out, do their work and put them back without shutting down the line.

The installation mechanism, developed with Swiss track maintenance company Scheuchzer, lays pre-assembled one-meter-wide panels between the rails like a carpet unrolling from a moving train and can cover up to 1,000 square meters a day.


The figures are deliberately low. The 18-kilowatt installation is expected to produce about 16,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, enough to power a handful of homes. That's not the point. The question is whether solar panels can handle the weight, vibration, metal dust from braking and repeated pressure waves of live train traffic in a three-year test running through April 2028.

Why nobody wants another solar farm in their backyard
The thing about solar is people like it, until it’s in their backyard. Big ground-mounted farms compete with communities for the same farmland, open spaces and scenic views they want to preserve. That tension has been painfully apparent in Switzerland, where voters turned down a 2023 proposal to put solar panels on Alpine mountainsides, underscoring that support for clean energy doesn’t necessarily include every site.

As the demand for solar grows, scientists and engineers have been working to figure out how to mitigate conflicts over the conversion of agricultural land a challenge that has spawned entire research fields around how to co-locate energy production with existing land uses without cannibalizing one another.

Rail corridors avoid that struggle altogether. The land is already disturbed, already mostly public land, and already thousands of miles long in open lines facing the sun. Researchers say coupling solar with existing infrastructure, such as canals, parking lots and transportation corridors, can reduce the environmental footprint of energy development by targeting land that’s already been altered.

The idea that almost didn't happen
The idea was born in 2020, when Sun-Ways founder Joseph Scuderi was standing on a train platform and saw the empty space between the rails. The path to approval was far from smooth. But in 2023, the Federal Office of Transport in Switzerland rejected the project outright, citing railway safety and maintenance concerns. Separately, the International Union of Railways expressed concerns about micro-cracks developing in the panels over time, heightened fire risk in close proximity to vegetation and reflections that could distract train drivers.

Sun-Ways spent months addressing every objection, commissioning independent safety reviews, reinforcing panels with tougher materials, adding anti-glare coatings, and installing built-in sensors to monitor panel health. One clever solution to dirt buildup: brushes mounted on trains that clean the panels as locomotives pass over them. Regulators approved the deal after 10 months of deliberation.

Martin Heinrich, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, said using railway tracks to harness solar power was “a great idea”. Sun-Ways is the first company to design a removable system that can be placed on lines that are actively carrying train traffic, he said.

The country’s largest electricity user, France’s national rail operator SNCF, is now actively studying the Buttes results to assess the impact of the panels on maintenance operations and infrastructure availability, with a collaboration agreement already in place.

What this means for the US
Americans may not pay much attention to train tracks but the country has more of them than anywhere else on Earth. The US rail network is about 140,000 miles (225,000 km) long and is the largest rail transport network of any country in the world. Even a piece of that corridor for the sun would be a huge untapped resource, one that requires no land acquisition, no rezoning battles, and no disruption to farms or habitat.

Sun-Ways estimates that the 5,000 kilometers of track in Switzerland alone could generate around one terawatt-hour of electricity a year, or about 2% of the country’s total consumption. The ambition is global and much bigger. Co-founder Baptiste Danichert has said there are more than one million kilometers of railway lines in the world and that about half could one day be fitted with the system, but that’s the company’s ambition rather than an independent forecast, as tunnels, shaded corridors, snow-heavy regions and complicated junctions all restrict what’s actually usable.

Sun-Ways CEO Joseph Scuderi has laid out an even longer-range vision: reinjecting solar power directly into the traction current that powers the trains themselves and having trains partially powered by the very track they run on. That goal is still some way off, but shows the distance this idea could go if the engineering works out.

The hard questions still ahead
The pilot is not trying to prove it cheap, not yet. Over three years, the test will monitor the levels of glare, dirt accumulation, panel deterioration, track compatibility and actual energy production. If the data is correct, the implications go far beyond one sleepy Swiss village. Rail operators in Europe are watching and Sun-Ways has already been looking for opportunities in the US and Asia.

A technology that turns existing rail corridors into linear solar farms without consuming a single acre of new land is exactly the kind of solution a crowded, energy-hungry world should see more of. The trains are already running, and now everyone waits to see what survives.