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Vesti RTR
Transport infrastructure cannot keep up with the development of vehicle fleet. Also, the state of the Russian railways does not meet the requirements of the times. An important document for the industry, which provides for construction and replacement of tens of thousands of kilometers of railways, has been recently adopted. However, we already have the technology developed to do it quickly and easily. But it is not always easy to switch to the innovation tracks even if the idea itself is bright enough.
This invention had to become a sensation. Dozens of top awards – the railway track-laying machine was already highly evaluated during the exhibitions in Switzerland, Belgium, Germany and France. The invention has two patents: Russian and American ones.
Typically, new tracks are unloaded by hand, then manually placed onto the railway bed. This means loss of time, hard work and, most importantly, a full stop of train traffic. Such a downtime for the scale of the Russian railways means tens of millions of rubles.
The railway track-laying machine mechanizes the process for the first time by independently lifting the old rails and laying the new ones in the same place. A person is required to press buttons only. There are no analogues in the world. The development was considered irrelevant by the Management of the Russian railways. Here is the official answer, "The specified Railway Track-Laying Machine has no advantages over the existing track-laying vehicles; in this connection, the technical and economic feasibility of purchasing of this type of a track-laying machine is not found. It is recommended to consider the question regarding the use of this technique with the metropolitan railway."
But the Management of the capital’s subway has also found disadvantages: the technologies developed and used currently in the Moscow Metro allow performing the repair work in full scale. Taking into account the aforesaid, the Metro considers it unreasonable to place an order for production of a working sample of the railway track-laying machine. Olga Uskova, President of the National Association of Innovation and Development of Information Technology, says, "The main key point is the relationship between innovations and money. I.e. one needs to have an explanation as regards a clear and simple way for getting money for development of the invention".
According to information of the World Economic Forum, Russia is on the 57th line of the List of the implementation of innovations in the production. USA, Switzerland and Finland are at the top of the list but Barbados is right before us. And the problem is not lack of fresh ideas for Russia. Domestic research institutes are overfilled with inventions, there are more than three million non-standard solutions. Less than 1 percent is being implemented in the production. Vladimir Vetvitsky, Head of Department of Information Technology of the Polytechnic Museum, argues, “When the border was opened, catastrophic brain drain began and science funding stopped. And all who could do something real, i.e. the majority of talented scientists moved to the west. Unfortunately, now the reverse trend is not observed".
Examples of unfair foreign origin of our inventions are known to all even from the school years, i.e. a light bulb, television set, the steam engine. There are also examples of barbarian attitude to innovations: Ivan the Terrible ordered to “cut-off the inventor’s head for his fellowship with the evil spirit” for the first manned flight in an apparatus heavier than air. Of course, since then the situation has changed.
Today, there are absolute successes, for example, the Omsk know-how: the applicator, which “burns” lymph nodes affected by a malignant tumor, it is already implemented in the Russian medicine. But the new railway track-laying machine will hardly be an example of the development of domestic innovation technologies. Pavlov, as the inventor of this item, has already been invited to Austria because a foreign plant has found in this project something more than mere disadvantages.
