Paint everything white! Why stop at rails?

Mostly because it doesn't stay white and looks bad. But it doesn't stop people from painting their siding white, for example.

Why paint the sides of the rails? Well you can paint the tops, but it tends to gum up the wheels and get worn off.

You want a paint with high reflectivity and high emissivity. Just be sure you aren't using infrared light temp measurement as to measure and make claims about differences in temperature, emissivity is something to watch out for when measuring temperature in that way.

20 degrees is surprising, I sure wish my car was white in the summer.

I wonder if you have okay effects with white rails in the winter?

> Why paint the sides of the rails? Well you can paint the tops, but it tends to gum up the wheels and get worn off.

Tops of rails are already pretty shiny for any mainline track seeing a couple dozen trains a day. I'd bet they are more reflective than white paint could be. And the paint would be gone after the first train passes through anyways.

They rust pretty quick, but with regular use it doesn't build up much since it's constantly being worn off from the wheel friction.

The top of the rail is already white!!!

It's just polished, so that it is reflective.

If you sanded it with your 180 grit paper, you would get the scattering which appears white.