It's Australia, the rail line is 143 km (89 miles). Putting up poles and hanging catenaries over that kind of distance is probably not cheap?
Either way it sounds brilliant, both simpler and better than catenaries, I like it!
Either way it sounds brilliant, both simpler and better than catenaries, I like it!
As for your swimming in money comment, I'm not sure what you mean; the Soviet Union was an industrial powerhouse and the second largest economy in the world between WW2 and the mid-80's, its economic decline only started after that with economic liberalisation under Gorbachev, followed by both oil price collapse and the costliest disaster in human history (until then), the Chernobyl incident, both in '86. Japan overtook it as the 2nd largest economy only by 1990.
Statistics about the Soviet economy are notoriously hard to make sense of. First, they ran a rather weird economic system (compared to the west), and second, you can't necessarily trust the statistics, there weren't really any independent organisations at all like we have in democracies. No independent media to check, no independent statistical institutes etc.
Even in the west environmentalism was only just getting en vogue in the second half of the 20th century. But the Soviet Union takes the cake in terms of how much environmental damage they were willing to take for a bit of extra economic output.
They also didn't have the same kind of battery capacity as we have today.
Electrified rail avoids shipping the engine and the fuel with the load, which ia often a big win in efficiency.