Yes, it's obvious and has been known in the industry since biblical times, but arose as a "solution" in the 1990s in order to get a stepless low gangway through the bogies by fixing the bogies in place and using short body sections to do the steering. It was also a cheaper solution to manufacture. However, it didn't solve the stresses and track damage and was directly the cause of the damage to the CAFs and the high rate of track wear on the Sydney light rail lines in general.rtt_rules wrote: Wed Oct 08, 2025 10:43 pm The more I looked into the this the more I agree non pivoting on tracks with lots of tight corners is surely a F-up. The bogies will try and dig into the rail at the same spot on every pass with their near flat wheels not helping to steer the fixed bogie.
In the 2000s, the industry overcame the engineering challenges to having swivelling bogies under a stepless low gangway and we can see in the table in that article that about half the models of modern low-floor trams available today have swivelling bogies and the number is growing. Even Alstom is using them, having acquired the technology from the former Bombardier and of course that's where the Melbourne E and G classes come from. Too late for Sydney though, which got the cheap deals thanks to TfNSW's engineering ignorance.
