Last Friday I was a train parked in S. Camden NJ. It has several coal cars on it. The cars had solar panel on the sides! One 2’ x 3’ panel on the side on one end. I don’t know if there was a panel on the other side.
Does somebody know why?
No, I wasn’t drinking and I wasn’t seeing things 
they are probably ballast cars where they can control when and where they dump the ballast.
stay safe
joe
They may also be powering impact detectors or new style on-board braking gear.
They might be producing and storing energy for Al Gores huge house.
You’re sure about that…
Seriously, I wish a lot of advances in railroading like electronic air brakes and positive train separation could take place this quickly. It was about ten years ago that I started seeing solar panels on some of UP’s ballast cars, then read an article in Railway Age or somewhere about how UP was using radio-controlled dumping to keep employees well away from the tracks during the operation, reducing the dust-breathing problem and avoiding the slips, trips, and falls connected with cascading ballast. This eventually expanded to entire systems like Herzog’s ballast train, which uses GPS and computerized controls to dump precisely controlled amounts of ballast at precise specific locations from a moving train. Herzog rebuilt a number of old steel coal gondolas into ballast hoppers for these trains.
Mudchicken mentions a couple of other applications that would use solar panels on freight cars. However, since you said you saw “coal cars” I suspect that it had more to do with ballast.
They were empty, so I don’t know what they had been hauling. They may have been ballast cars. They were the classic silver with 1 end painted yellow.
The automated ballast cars does make sense, though.
Thanks for the input guys!