John55
Member
Funny you mention the Empire State, it is designed to cope with lightening strikes because it has rods to attract and redirect the lightening. You seriously suggest we do this with every piece of railway electronics?
Railway electronics (and other equipment) isn't fitted out in the open 1250 ft above local ground level. It is installed within a building as demonstrated by the photograph of the damaged substation someone posted earlier in the thread. Good design keeps the surge outside the equipment rooms and protects the equipment.
The point of lightning protection is to keep damaging surges away from anything which might be damaged (including any staff in the building at the time of a strike by the way). All buildings are required to have a lightning protection system and clearly a building like the Empire State will have a rather more substantial one than most.
A strike on a signal gantry should go straight to earth at the gantry and the protection systems should prevent conducted transients damaging equipment connected to anything on the gantry.
If you think about the mobile phone network it is much more exposed to lightning strikes and doesn't fall over all the time.