I was looking at RR Picture Archives and saw these photographs. I have never seen or heard of this method before.
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2403118
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2403111
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2403113
Those are some great photos.
How else would you propose to bring segments of rail back together that the cold has caused to stretch apart from each other?
With a hydraulic rail puller. As far as I know my railroad doesn’t burn rail to move it anymore. I don’t work section so I could be wrong, but it was my understanding that we no longer did this. If the rail jumps too much to be pulled back together then you splice in a new piece to eliminate the gap.
Wow! Hope they remembered to bring the hot dogs!
I would assume the combination of pouring a flammable substance on wooden ties soaked with creosote might not be all that good for the ties, sure, that combination would greatly improve the lifetime of the road bed and preserve the ties.
Normally the fire is from a rope soaked in Diesel Fuel or Kerosine.
Brand Name = Firesnake
very common - high cloth rope soaked in kerosene
Hydraulic Rail pullers have only a limited range they can work with. (slippage is an issue)
See the Firesnake website and also check out the video link there. Cool, yet very hot stuff
From the looks of the smoke in the pictures, though, I don’t think they are using Firesnake.
Thanks for sharing the links to those dramatic photos ! Note the dates - Jan. 2011.
We used a woven fiberglass rope soaked in diesel fuel, lit with a fusee (flare) or cutting torch, in the absence of more formal methods - on-track rail heater, summer sun, warm day, etc.
Putting it out when done could be a mite challenging, though, other than waiting for it to burn out. [:-^] A metal spike can with its original lid would serve as a glorified candle-snuffer - otherwise, just throw dirt and sand on it.
Continuous Welded Rail (CRW) must be laid at a given temperature, if it is colder than this out side, the rail must be heated to that temperature.
ROAR
When working with CWR, you can pull a little bit with a hydraulic puller or a “firesnake”, but if you are laying rail you need to use a traveling heater to bring the rail uniformly up to the preferred anchoring temperature.
The difference is in how much of an area you are trying to adjust. To close an open joint on an emergency basis, you only have to pull enough locally (a couple hundred feet maybe) to get it to close enough to get bolts in a joint bar. You still have to come back before warm weather returns and adjust a much longer stretch through that area so that you don’t create a potential problem.
The FRA takes a very close look at a railroad’s provedures for handling any kind of adjustment of CWR, with good reason.
Saw that method in use by CSX here locally a few years ago. There was a northbound waiting for them to finish, so I’m guessing it was such that it needed immediate attention.
Pull-a-parts - when they occur are disrupting traffic and need to be fixed as quickly as possible to get traffic rolling again, The fact the the ‘fix’ may not be the optimum repair is secondary at that point in time; time can be made available later to optimize the repair.
Pull-a-parts and broken rails are normally discovered by track and/or signal personnel inspecting a track section after a track circuit has be left on after a train has departed the track section. The second area of discovery will be from a signal maintainer responding to malfunctioning grade crossing protection. The 3rd area of discovery is for a passing train to report ‘rough track’ at a specific point and MofW personnel will discover the situation in their resulting inspection. The final method of discovery is when the train derails because of the defect. These happenings occur 99.9% of the time while a train is passing over the affected track.
There’s a lot of incentive to lay and adjust the CWR to a higher “Neutral Temperature” than a lower one, because:
Hence, from a risk-based cost-weighted probabilistic computation to minimize the “Present Value” of the expected future costs of both sets of occurrences for any given proposed Neutral Temperature, the results are heavily skewed towards a higher temperature. You certainly would not just 'split the difference" and choose a middle value between the high and low termperatures in the region ! Instead, the result may be more like favoring 70 to 80 % of the way towards the higher temperatures.
To illustrate with some fictional numbers:
Suppose a region has a winter low of - 10 deg. F, and the rail has a summer high temeprature of 140 deg. F, for a total temperature range or ‘swing’ of 150 deg. F.
Suppose that each ‘pull-apart’ costs $10,000 in MOW crew and train delay costs, but each heat kink costs $50,000 in MOW crews and has a 10% chance of causing a $1 million derailment (10% x $1 million = $100,000 average probable cost for the derailment), or $150,000 altogether.
The goal is to pick a temperature where the probable total cost of each risk - pull-aparts + heat kinks - is at a minimum. Sparing the calculus theory, that occurs when the incremental trade-off o
While Mr. North illustrates very nicely the goal of attaining a specific rail temperature when laying or repairing rail, I am left wondering how the goal could be even approximated using as crude a tool as the firerope. I suspect there must be some rules of thumb MOW personnel apply when actually in the field and being pressured to get a line reopened ASAP.
A common sight around rail yards is a flatcar of prefabricated track panels to be used to reconstruct a line torn up by a derailment. I assume, but do not know, that these would also need heat applied before being welded into the line.
Show stopper
An empty coal train made it over this. We figured something was up when we got word of crossing malfunctions ahead, and got talked past a signal. We got to sit and wait while the section cut in a new piece of rail. Later on , when warmer out, the patch got welded in, and can’t really tell where this was any more.
Pull-aparts are preferred to heat kinks. Kinks usually don’t trip the signal system, so a train could run full speed into quite a mess.
WSOR: Pull Aparts are the polar opposite of Sun/Heat kinks. (Expansion vs. Contraction in the nature and properties of materials)
From up above: raising the temperature of the rail also involves knocking off all the anchors of the rail you want to run and then getting that rail many degrees higher than the ambient temperature. An awful lot of that fire and flame never translates into raising the temperature of the rail (and it’s a really slow process. Get the rail to meet at the joint?- Fine, drill it and bolt it up with the bars and then extinguish the flames/remove the fire rope mui pronto. The rail will start to slowly contract again.)
Panels? - Be ready to cut out an extra inch or two in the spring and weld it up before the rail gets up in the plates come summer…or the rail starts heading for the fences.
Some of the earlier fire/smoke comments is the difference between diesel and kerosene. In a pinch, splinters, twigs and chopped-up kindling will also work (but risk of tie fires is greater)
Trains like Tracks, they do not want to leave them. Here, give it a try!
That is great!!! … Thanks for sharing.