How Melbourne trams eat through water pipes

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Trams are incredibly eco-friendly, right up until their leaking electricity begins silently eating the city's subterranean infrastructure.

From the Stacky collection1 min read

How Melbourne trams eat through water pipes — STACKY / Transport

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Trams are incredibly eco-friendly, right up until their leaking electricity begins silently eating the city's subterranean infrastructure. Stray direct current from tram tracks loves to find an easier path home through parallel cast-iron water mains. This rogue electricity triggers aggressive galvanic corrosion, literally dissolving thick utility pipes into rust within months. Engineers fight this underground war by wrapping pipes in sacrificial anodes that die so the plumbing can live.

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How Melbourne trams eat through water pipes

A closer look

A bigger world.One discoveryat a time.

Keep exploring

Spraying a precisely engineered friction paste directly onto tight rail curves prevents the massive Melbourne Tram Network from deafening pedestrians with the horrifying high…

What hidden design clue on American highway signs tells you exactly which side your exit will be on?

Digging the massive underground Channel Tunnel between England and France produced such an unfathomable amount of excavated chalk and dirt that the British literally used their…

How a bicycle can trigger a traffic light

Late nineteenth-century bicyclists actually launched the original campaign to pave American roads, spearheading the Good Roads Movement decades before automobiles even became a common sight on the streets.

Toll booth operators historically experienced terrible respiratory issues from inhaling concentrated vehicle exhaust for eight hours a day, leading to the rapid automation of electronic toll collection systems.

A bigger world.
One discovery
at a time.