Pavel Barysenka: Catenary Engineering

I'm Pavel Barysenka, an overhead contact system (OCS) design engineer. I have worked on railway, tram and metro electrification projects.

Here I write about the calculations behind catenary design: wire mechanics, sag and tension, equivalent spans, droppers and overlaps. Each article goes step by step from the physics to the numbers, and most come with an editable Excel workbook you can use in your own work.

I also write about automating OCS design in Autocad and Civil 3D.