HI everyone I was wondering something. I cross the train tracks on Clement and Morgan every morning here in Milwaukee,Wi and it’s the location of a spring switch but. There is a metal box coming out of the ground what looks like a heater to melt ice and snow from the switch in the winter time but what kinda of heater works like that is a propane heater that the track crew can turn on and off. Inside the work building that’s a couple hundred of feet from the switch it’s self or how does it work.
Not being familiar with the installation, it would be hard to describe its working or its activation.
The three types I’m most familiar with are electrical (calrods by the stock rails), gas-jet (usually with conspicuous propane tanks nearby–also see the post elsewhere on the page), or the type that blows warm air into the points–and from your description, I suspect that’s what you’ve got. I’m not sure whether the air is heated electrically or otherwise, but fans force the air to the desired location(s).
As for activation, it could be as simple as a nearby employee flipping the switch, or as complex as a snow sensor turning it on, or weather reports suggesting that the dispatcher activate the switch (the last two are usually for mainline switches).
At work, I push a button to start the blowers, when requested by the signal maintainer. The lower switches have the calrods, which are turned on with an electrical switch when conditions warrant.
I hope someone else with authoritative answers will weigh in here.
I’m in a cold winter part of the country. I don’t ever recall seing a switch heater. Are they just hidden that well? If Chicago has them, I can’t believe we don’t have them.
Were I work, many of the snow heaters are turned on and off by the train dispatcher. On the computer screen there is a menu at each controll point that allows the dispatcher to control them.
We have decidedly low-tech switch heaters, kero fired smudge pots. When weather threatens, the signal or track guys come out with a can of kero. Fill up the pots. Then light them with a fusee.
Nick
The switch heaters that I have seen are at power switches and spring switches. Places where you don’t want to have a person clean the switch of snow before use.
The newest CTC crossovers in western Iowa have the electric switch heaters. Last winter during some extreme conditions they couldn’t keep up and the result was frozen switches. Part of the problem was they were dispatcher activated and weren’t turned on soon enough.
Jeff
In the airplane world, there are two types of ice defenses…anit-ice, which has to be started well before icing is noticed, and De-ice, which can actually remove accumulated ice from wing surfaces.
Even De-ice systems arent effective unless they are started soon enough…
This one protecting the switch from the EJE lead into the east yard at Eola was replaced before the last winter, but it will give you an idea of what a switch heater looks like. Notice the gas line entering on the left side.
Well de-ice systems will work regardless of when you start, it might just take A LOT of type 1 fluid.
I remember those–they all disappeared at about the same time as the kerosene switch lamps did (what I’d give for a lunar-white lens from one of those!).
Sometimes the old ways are better–and more effective. And one still needs those brooms with the steel chisels on the end of the handle at times!
(I also miss the smell of kerosene smoke!)
Can’t you just run an air line into the office of one of the railroad high-ups and use the hot air generarted via telephone to keep the switches clear? Might be some might expensive hot air though. . . … 
When I used to ride the Paoli local into Phillie, you could walk down the the end of the commuter station at 30th St. station and see the entrance where the commuter lines went underground on their way into Penn Center. There were all sorts of puzzle switches at the mouth of that tunnel, each with a set of smudge pots flickering away, the ground covered with little tongues of flame, putting out those wisps of black smoke. Aways thought it looked something like the entrance to Hell.
Dave H.
Here’s a better idea - build a dome over Capitol Hill to capture the hot air, and you’d have enough to melt the snow in two or three states. We’re already paying them, so the only added cost would be moving the heated air.
Or better yet, station a few Congressmen at each major yard, and you would (1) melt the snow, and (2) limit the harm they do the country (can’t pork-barrel as effectively when they aren’t all in one place). Six or eight of them could melt the snow in UP’s Bailey Yard in a couple of hours, if you get them wound up pretty well
[#ditto] [#ditto] [#ditto] [#ditto] [#ditto] [#ditto] [#ditto]
Now thats a good idea!
Smudge pots!..off on a tangent>>>>>Those are the bowling ball sized globes, that look like an old fashioned bomb, that the Roadrunner would light, and then hand to the Coyote? In the late 70’s, while in college, a buddy and I were at a disco (remember-this was the 70’s). We got split up, and he road home with persons unknown. Somewhere, on his trip back to the college, he aquirred one of those smudge pots. It was still in his dorm room the next day, when I drug his behind out of bed. Good thing he slept with the windows open, as the thing was still lit![:O]
The ones you’re describing used to be standard on construction sites, until they started putting battery-powered blinkers on barricades.
The “smudge pots” we had on our railroad were of a different shape, low enough and narrow enough to fit between ties and under rails (at switches, anyway), and long enough to hold a good supply of fuel. The flame was at one end; it could conceivably be positioned out of everyone’s way.
In locations where smudge pots are used on line of road where the can be viewed by the public…the next thing the parties that light them need to do is to notify the local fire department that the smudge pots are lit and that they need to stay lit…otherwise, the FD comes and douses the interlocking with water and truly freezes the plant solid. Blocking the FD in on the road that serves the interlocking a time or two with a train that can’t move because the switches now need to be thawed out does tend to cure them of this behavior.