Tonight, I wish I had a camera with me, or at least a notepad. For reasons I sure don’t understand, BNSF is replacing rail on about 1 mile of switching track into lumberyard in my town. Having finished the task, all the equipment was on it’s own train,parked on a siding next to the bike path. It looked like one piece of every kind of track laying equipment made. All of it rides on flatcars with tracks on them. The last car in the group also carried the ramp for getting down to track level. My favorite car was the purpose-built one that transports the aqua colored biffy!
In looking at the newly laid track,(which runs through a hospital parking lot), I’m curious about a few things:
Near the crossings, instead of spikes, the rails are held in place with plates and funky clips that look like CN’s noodle symbol to me. The plates are bolted down, as you can see 4 nuts on top of the plate. What are they bolted to?
Railroads have been holding rails to ties for what,175 years? Railroads have also been looking for loose spikes for probably as long. Why isn’t there a way to use something like a lag bolt in place of the spike?
The new rail,ribbon rail. for whatever reason, has lots of chalk marks on them. The mark “115” seems easy enough to figure out-115# rail? But there are lots of marks like: A 3/5 K1/4 . One rail had the number 36 chalked every 50’ or so. Inspector #15 ?
(1) The “bolts” are heavy lag screws (timber screws)…Probably made by Lewis Nut & Bolt Co. (La Junta CO, formerly Minneapolis)…The struggle for years on railroads has been making a lag screw that can consistently take the abuse (they usually fail on the smooth stem just below the head) and uses the same tool the same tool (bit) to remove it 10 years later when the technology changes.
Cut spikes at grade crossings are a pain over time because the cross traffic (especially trucks) has a bad habit of creating downed ties and raised spikes because the impact forces are greater than the friction forces holding the spikes into the wood. The square spike hole gets enlarged and the sides of the spikes get rubbed shiny smooth. if the abuse is bad enough, the rail winds up suspended in the air up to an inch above the tie plate and vibrates when traffic hits it. (And repairing a crossing requires closing the street to traffic which can be a big pain when the shortsighted numbnuts that congregate at city hall have no clue about what you are doing to make a safe crossing.)
(2) some of those markings indicate the rail’s placement in the railtrain (rack position and level). Other markings help rail supervisors inspect movement of the rail while on the rail train (That rail is “tied-down” only in one place in the middle of the train. Otherwise the rail would “Bind” in curves while on the train and there would be bedlam.
(3) with secondhand rail, the rail is either cropped to 36 ft or 33 foot lengths to eliminate the typical end batter and excessive wear on joint battered old rail. The “36” you are looking at very well may indicate where the rail was flash-butt welded at Pueblo or elsewhere.
It seems to me that someone had written a book about railroad track mainenance equipment, illustrated with a lot of photos, but I can not remember the name of the book or the author.
I live within easy walking distance of the lumber yard where Murphy Siding works, and on Monday afternoon of this week I was actually out photographing some of this machinery in action. Much of the track that was being upgraded runs past Howes Oil Company where I work part time. I talked with two or three of the guys on this BNSF crew and one of them told me that one of the reasons that they were upgrading much of the rail is because of the weight of the tank cars that the local BNSF switch crews bring into the yard adjacent to Howes Oil company.
One of these guys told me they were welding the ends of the rails together with an electric device which sends a high voltage current through the rail itself, and that you could stand 20 feet away from the welder, place your hands on the rail and not be electrocuted!! I find THAT a bit hard to believe.
Two of these guys that I talked to, offered me bottles of ice cold water, even though it was not particularly hot here in Sioux Falls, South Dakota on Monday afternoon. I have found that BNSF railroad personel are pretty nice people to talk with, as long as you stay out of the way of any obvious danger.
I have seen the “CN noodle tie clips” that Murphy Siding referrs to, and while I do wonder if the old fashioned spikes are falling into disuse, the BNSF did use a lot of spikes in upgrading all this rail in my neighborhood. There were a couple machines that had spikes loaded into what looked like something like a converyor belt, and they were being driven into the wooden ties with some kind of a hydraulic hammer.
Actually, I work for the lumberyard downtown…That makes sense about having heavier rail for all those tank cars. Some of the old rail they pulled out looked pretty wimpy in comparison.
How does a track relaying operation like that work? It would appear that they would have to be a trained crew that does only that kind of work. Do they just travel around the system?
Not hard to believe at all. It’s probably DC current, not AC, and both terminals of the device are isolated from earth ground. Therefore, all the current flows constantly from one terminal of the device to the other, and has no inclination to flow on any divergent path, regardless of whether it’s the rail beyond the where the device is connected or through your hands. AC, on the other hand, is usually much more difficult to isolate from earth ground in the same fashion, and in fact it’s not desirable to do so- thus the potential to be shocked by it.
However, if you were to grab onto one of the terminals with one hand, and touch the rail with the other, you might be picking yourself up out of a nearby ditch…
Reguardless of weather it’s AC or DC as Brian pointed out you have to complete a circuit to be shocked, and earth ground is not part of that circuit. Even if you did complete that circuit the resistance of the human body is VERY high. At the low voltages used in welders shock hazard is relatively low. With electric welders it’s the VERY high current that flows through the metal with very little resistance that heats up the weld. You can parallel up a couple 12 volt car batteries and be able to weld yet if you grab both terminals you will not get shocked. The only real hazzard is if you welding and for some reason the welding circuit path is broken WHILE you are touching BOTH terminals, that will bite.
The AC haveing more kick then DC is kind of a myth. It comes from how AC voltage is measured with a voltmeter. With DC you measure the valtage and what you measure is what you have, 120 volts DC is 120 volts. But seince AC is constantly changeing value you only are at peek value for a portion of the cycle. So a voltmeter will read an AVERAGE voltage value. This is called RMS (root mean square or something like that). It is .707 of what the peek voltage is for a sinewave. So that so called 120volt wall outlet is actually 170 volts peek even though a voltmeter will read 120 volts.
I know where you work, Murphy Siding. It’s north of me and across the river, just beyond 10th Street and west of the BNSF yard. And in fact, in answer to an earlier post from me, you told me who you work for.
One of the guys on this BNSF track laying crew told me that he came down here from Grand Forks, North Dakota. I don’t know about the others though. The BNSF busses these guys to their work sites with an old school bus that had been painted white and bears the standard, round shaped BNSF logo. It was parked in the parking lot at Howes Oil. I have a close friend at Howes Oil who’s husband is a track laborer for BNSF, and I asked her if her husband was involved in this project. She told me that he had been sent to someplace in Minnesota to work with another project.
One of the track workers told me that despite all the money that BNSF made this past fiscal year, he only got a very tiny raise of one penny per hour. He didn’t seem to be very happy with that. I would wager that he is making a LOT more money per hour than I am. And as much as I would love to go to work for the BNSF, there is no way I’d be able to pass the required physical exam.
I had mentioned a book about track maintenance equipment. The name of the author suddenly came to me, it’s Brian Soloman (I’m not sure of the correct spelling of Brian’s last name). This book would be well worth buying if you can find it anywhere, I think.
I’m going to try to get the full roll of film of the pictures that I had taken within the next week or so. I send all my film to a lab in Denver, our own Harold’s camera stores screwed me in what I had to pay for developing and printing four rolls of film from a recent trip to Colorado. One of these days I will make the switch to digital format. After seeing
Sorry, I thought you had me working at the competition.[:O]. I stopped and watched that crew work for a little while at the Cliff Avenue crossing. That’s pretty impressive watching all the equipment in motion.
The work is dependent on the size of the operation. For a smaller job, the local forces can handle it. Much larger than a curve relay and you are better off with a dedicated extra gang.
For bigger jobs, like district relays, a dedicated gang with extra equipment is the way to go. In the western US, the former ATSF Navajo steel gangs (there are two) are hands down, the best there are. No one else can hold a candle to those folks. (I’ve seen them embarrass SP, UP and BN extra gangs of similar size) You might start faster than the Navajos, but at the end of the day they will disappear way out in front of you with better quality and precision work. They do it by working at a constant speed all day long.