At lunch time, I got to see a railgrinder, Loram # RG319 (?) in operation. I was expecting to see a shower of sparks. Instead, it looked more like a house fire on wheels. From the looks of things, it takes a lot of power to push that thing along. The amount of black smoke it produces would rival a big 'ol steam locomotive.
About an hour later, I walked out back in our lumber yard, and there she sits, pulled into our spur.[tup]
Is the grinding done in stages? From the looks of the cars, I’m thinking maybe they do the railroad equivilent of starting with 100 grit sandpaper, and working their way down to 660 grit.
I think we’ve crashed LORAM’s Home page?? Cannot get to it[:-,]
EDIT AND ADD: All I know is when I got to the site you had listed, I had problems with error messages that indicated there was a problem connecting with it. [B)] May I was wrong about it…Been there before![|(]
Those rail grinders can be pretty spectacular…There was one here a couple of months ago (a number of grinding units and tank cars. It was working at night between Mulvane and Wellington., it was quite a show, and I was amazed at the speed it was grinding;I was really surprised at the amount of auxiliary bright lights it displayed when stopped to check or change stones…Bright as Day!. Mudchicken commented it was probably just doing a lite grind.
Two days ago there was one of the LORAM new RG400’s working north from Mulvane towards Wichita ( Ark City Sub). Not nearly the show when it was night grinding.
Sam - I dunno, both LOPRAM’s Home page at - http://www.loram.com/ - and the link to the Rail Grinding page that I posted above just worked fine for me - and this is on an old clunky Windows 2000 O/S machine . . . [:-^]
Murphy: We watched Harsco this last weekend. They had “mudflaps” over their grinders and we couldn’t see anything except the guy on the back with the water hose. But we have seen other grinders work and it looked like a prairie fire on rails.
Maybe like your sandpaper, there are some just for maintenance grinders and others that are for more in depth grinding?
Rail grinders grind to a specified rail contour. When grinding first became a accepted practice, multiple passes over the rail were necessary to obtain the desired contour since the natural wear patterns of the rail had to be overcome.
Now that rail grinding is a accepted maintenance practice, the rail gets ground more frequently and normally requires only a ‘skim’ type grind to achieve the proper rail contour.
To my knowledge, the grinders only use one ‘package’ of grinding stones…there may be grit variations between grinding positions on the machine… ie. 1st 5 stone positions may be course grit, next 5 stone positions may be medium grit and and last 5 stone position may be extra fine grit. Or potentially, all stone positions have the same grit…I don’t know. Maybe Mudchicken can provide additional expertise.
Having used a milling machine and lathe to form metal parts, I can say that metal shavings are not something you want to touch, regardless of the temperature.
Speno droppings, shavings from the grinders can cause severe burns 48-72 hours later even though they look “grey”…that’s why so much water is dumped on the track during and after grinding.
The “grey” is just a sugar coating that holds in the heat underneath.