Well, I sometimes think the triac was the the worst invention EVER for train electronics! If only we could have bypassed the 60's (60 Hz that is) and jumped right to the modern switching frequencies of 100's of kHz or MHz. I marvel at how you now buy a home-theater amplifier that puts out over 1 kW of clean AC waveforms at about 10 cents per Watt or less. By using the class-D and related modulation methods we could easily have "pure" sine variable train transformers and none of this chopped-sine vs. pure-sine, peak vs. rms, and all that nonsense.
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