Althought these particulars seem insignificant, these
and many other poles in the station are part of history of electrifictation
in Italy, not only for railways.
They are part of themselves history since recently
(june 1999) even them have been removed to make space to the work for the
new Firenze-Bologna high speed line.
The interest for these poles is that they are still
of the original model planted in 1927 when the Line Firenze-Pistoia-Bologna
was electrified on three-phase 16.7 Hz.
The model of poles eventually changed and are today
are very rare those with that cast pinnacles on the top, and the twin poles
that you can see on top right and bottom .
Anyway the most interesting part is the former electric
substation, that you can see in the two pictures just below this text,
that transformed the current from 15 to 3.6 kV ... and the frequency
too.
Railways used 16 2/3 Hz , with their own production plants, in the Alps
and a thermoelectric one at Torralba (Genova). The Firenze Bologna line
was instead far from any other electrified line, and an electric plant
was built at Bologna, connected with the northern Italy commercial electric
network, using 50Hz with rotating converter.
At Firenze, at southern end of line was not built
any electric plant, but just a substation with rotating converter, that
got power from local network, that at the time in central Italy was still
45 Hz.
So the connection between the northenr and central
Italy network, previously unconnected, was done thought the railway power
lines, with an intermediate frequency of 16.7 Hz.
The building is still there, althought electrical
equipment have moved to a newer building,
on the opposite side of the line, sligtly north, and is used as storage
and in part for office (of course by the electrical department of FS) and
on night it is illuminated.
This station was, until 1985 circa, when the new station of Castello was built , an important freight place and most trains switched here. In the picture below, courtesy of Leandro Colli that provided also the pictures of the former electric substation from north and the one of the switches later., a freight train with E626.361 (now retired from active service) heading to Livorno.
Many
local industries had thir connection with the station, and wandering around
it one can found in the pavement of the nearby roads many tracks, that
served local stores ...
On picture on left you can see one of these tracks,
direcly connected with the main track to Campo di Marte. This picture is
interesting not only because it documents a disappeared era, but also since
it shows two rare pieces of track: a symmetrical Y switch (bottom left)
and a derailer (center, toward right) since there was no room for a regular
stub.
In via Panciatichi still are the end of this track,
with a switch .
Shunting on these tracks was often a game of push and pull, since some tracks were accessible only by a backup move, often throught another place, to save space, and track ( the fee that an industry had to pay to railway was proportional to the lenght of the tracks, the longer the tracks more cars had to be loaded or paid for, hence the sharing of tracks with neighbours.
But the most curious track i found was this small one ( 600 mm gauge ) track on the SW direction going toward the place were now there is a large parking and previously were some warehouses.
The pictures below show that small tracks of which
survive a couple of meters only.
