LAB / RAILWAY ELECTRICITY
Rail Power Lab
An interactive teaching tool about the electrical equipment of conventional railways. It has two pages: the Power Lab, where you drive with the master controller while tracing the flow of power, and the Overhead Wire Inspection Lab, which measures wire wear.
- ControlsMouse / touch
- PagesTwo (Power Lab, Wear Lab)
- NetworkNothing sent out
What kind of lab is it?
It visualizes the single loop that power travels — power plant, substation, feeder, overhead wire, pantograph, main circuit, traction motor, wheel, rail, and back to the substation — using flowing current particles and a graph of overhead-wire voltage along the line.
How it is built
A static site with no dependencies, written entirely in ES Modules. The traction/electrical model and the Canvas drawing live in separate files.
What you can do in the Power Lab
- Switch electrification between DC 1500V and AC 20000V and compare current and voltage drop
- Drive with the master controller (power P1–P4 / coast / brake B1–B3 / emergency)
- Move the train's distance from the substation and confirm that voltage drops the most at the midpoint
- Change the gradient (±35‰), toggle regenerative braking, and toggle whether an accelerating train is nearby to reproduce regeneration failure
- Follow the conversion chain from pantograph to traction motor in the "inside the train" view
- Step through a nine-step guide that sets the controls for you as it explains
Overhead Wire Inspection Lab (wear.html)
The Overhead Wire Inspection Lab has a cross-section view that shows how wear and uneven wear on the wire's sliding surface behave, and a measuring-car view that records height, lateral deviation and remaining diameter together while running a 2km section. You can jump to six points of interest (departure side of a station, under an overpass, an air section, a crossover, a curve, a tunnel mouth) and read why each one goes out of tolerance.
How the numbers are handled
The figures shown are a simplified model based on typical values seen on Japanese conventional lines — not design values for any specific train or line. No account or saved data is required, and nothing is sent anywhere.