north of lima ohio on csx trackage, train gang is replacing rail. I haven’t seen it done in 25 years or so. is that the average life span for rail replacement?
It can be that long, or it can be much shorter for curved rail in heavy tonnage areas. In the Powder River Basin premium rail used in curves lasts two years or so, and that is with a transposition after the first year (moved from the outside of the curve to the inside to spread the wear on both sides of the head). Mudchicken can give you a more detailed answer.
We run on 1925 rail on a regular basis, and have some older stuff on a couple of sidings.
The CSX (former NYC) track near me includes (or did, until very recently) some 1930’s stick rail welded into CWR.
It’s all in the usage.
Yep, that’s well within the normal range. At 25 years, the last time the rail was changed would have been 1985 or so - is this a former ConRail track that CSX acquired, by any chance ? Because CR did a heckuva lot of that back then.
Do you have any idea of what the sections/ weights are, both of the ‘old’ rail and the new rail ? That would be interesting to know as well.
Also - is this mainly tangent or straight track ? Or, is it only or mainly curves ? Or, it is just all the rail in a main track that is being replaced
According to Rush Loving’s book “The Men Who Loved Trains,” Conrail spent billions buying and running equipment and gangs to weld jointed rail into continuous welded rail.
In some way, you can learn about how CSX and NS take care of CR property. CSX has had spates of “sun kink” incidents while NS has had relatively no problems with theirs.
Also, if you don’t take care of the rail in it’s normal life cycle and scrimp on maintenance, that rail degrades faster. (if you have a good grinding program, cut down on the corrugation and the neanderthals don’t leave wheel burns and nicks everywhere, that rail is going to serve much longer.)
Conversely, if you have bad mill practices and the rail is piped with bad occlusions or bad flashbutt welds coming out of the mill or centrallized welding plant…that rail won’t be out there very long (witness Bethlehem Steel and Southern Pacific in the 1980’s, especially over Tehachapi)
(ConRail was so busy covering for their predecessors sins, they never got to normal)
Back in the mid-1980’s - when NS was angling to buy CR - one of the attractions was CR’s cash balance, which had then built up to on the order of $1 Billion or so, and would have made a dandy special dividend or distribution to the NS stockholders, for example. A pet theory of mine - which I lack any documentation to prove - is that CR’s CEO L. Stanley Crane and cohort attempted to foil that - or at least reduce the spoils to be had - by putting as much of that money as possible into a place from where it would be toughest to extract. That’s not rolling stock, since it is easily moved - instead, it was the track. I’ve commented here before about the apparent near-‘gold plating’ of some branch and secondary lines that was accomplished back then - the rebuild and rehab was so extensive that I suppose that it is indeed only now that the rail and ties are needing significant renewals - hence my guess above as to the heritage of this line.
I believe that most of CSX’s sun kink problems occurred on tracks that it has long owned, not those that it acquired from CR. My recollection is that has happened in more southern locations than CR ever was - such as in Florida and Virginia - most often, not so much further north. If anyone has any statistics or other objective documentation of that one way or the other, I’d be interested in knowing about it.
I understand even though a stretch of rail may no longer suitable for mainline service, it can still be useful in yards, and less busy lines that do not see so much traffic or need for fast trains. Some rail can have a life span of up to 70 years by this process.
Paul: As my memory servers me you are mostly correct. For whatever reason the water level route has only had a few reported sun kinks. The B&O out of Wash both to BAL/PHL and to the Western Maryland routes. Note: MARC has had many heat orders and almost derailments due to sun kinks. VRE has also suffered under RF&P route heat orders. CSX originally limited the commuter trains to 40 MPH but now just call for a 10 or 20 MPH reduction of the posted speed limit.
On track age. On the CSX A&WP subdivision the track was 112 # RE rail welded with bolt holes cropped dated 1916 - 1920 until about 1998. It was then replaced over a couple years with 127 # rail. It was further replaced with 141# rail starting about 3 years ago. During this whole time the subdivision’s max speed is listed at 50 MPH. The 127 # rail was retrevied but the 112 # rail was cut up in short lengths for scrap.
It can be well over 100 years… back in the late 1990’s a RR donated some recently taken up rail to a local histerial park and at least one stick had “Carnegie 1884” in raised relief molded in the web side.
We have several sections in PTRA’s North Yard rolled in 1924, and I found several sticks out in the Cargill grain elevator dated 1910…and they run today’s big covered hoppers over it all day long.
Tiny looking rail, doesn’t look like it would hold up a SW9 much less the dash 9s and SD70s on the grain trains today.
BT - The term is “cascading” rail
Have some 1874 60# rail (that was huge stuff back then, most rail was 30# to 45#)) in Denver in daily service in the backtracks… Date is in roman numerals.
Post 1900 rail is common in many branch main lines.
See last months issue of TRAINS to see how NS replaces two rails at a time!
Yes, after I posted that I realized that any of the sun kink problems I’ve read about were here in Virginia and Maryland, not really CR territory.
What I thought is interesting abuot the CR story has these aspects:
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Rather than replace rail, re-lay as CTR on existing ties and tamp it.
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Billions in debt, given by banks and underwritten by the government.
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All debt paid back with interest to those banks after around 11 years.
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CSX and NS fight over CR and both fail.
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Conrail gets even richer.
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Biggest IPO in history to that time when CSX and NS fight over it again almost ten years later.
The VRE sun kink was on the CSX line only.
To answer the question, north of Lima, OH, is former B&O territory.
This has more to do with axle loading than MGT. Old rail is usually work-hardened from the days of 40, 60 and 80 ton carloads. Even as axle loading increased, that old rail (in contrast to problems with joints and roadbeds) stood up pretty well and the traditional “straight mileage pro-rate” still provided a useful method of estimating rail life.
New, heavy rail, such as that installed during the Conrail era, wasn’t work hardened, and not only wore out faster under the heavier axle loadings, but defect propagation tended to be logarithmic rather than linear. This was the era that saw mainline rail being retired from mainline use earlier, not because of wear as had been the case previously, but because of defects.
Here is one engineering observation from the Conrail era:
"An iron ore road, using cars grossing 210,000 lbs on 33-inch wheels obtained a first position rail life of 800 million gross tons with 112-pound jointed rail. This rail was removed with 1/8th-inch headwear because of end batter and bolt hole breaks. It has since been cropped and welded for second-po
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What is a sun kink?
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What is work hardening?
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A “sun kink” is when the entire track - both rails and ties, though rarely just 1 of the rails - buckles horizontally* pretty sharply at 1 or 2 locations, to form either an angle instead of a tangent or a smooth curve. They are caused by the compressive stresses in the rail that are induced from warming up and wanting to expand as a result - most typically from hot sun, hence the name. They can occur in either jointed or Continuous Welded Rail - ‘back in the day’, a specific space was left between the rails at each joint which depended on the rail’s temperature, so as to allow each rail to expand and contract without affecting the next rail. With CWR there is no such space, so proper adjustment of the rail’s length for the local temperature and anchoring of the rail to the ties became far more important.
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“Work Hardening” in this context is the increase in hardness and strength of the surface of the rail from all the heavy and concentrated wheel loads rolling over it. Those wheels and loads are like many more rollers at the steel mill - only th
ICLand - First, [#welcome] You’ve got a great couple of first posts. I look forward to more of them. I’ll respond to your excellent points above later on.
A little more on “work hardening”, from INTERFACE - The Journal of Wheel/Rail Interaction - “What Kind of Rail Materials Will Survive in Heavy-Haul Service?”, (Part 2 of 2), By James R. Hornaday, Jr. • October, 2009, last paragraph at the bottom of page 2 of 3, at - http://www.interfacejournal.com/features/10-09/railmat2/2.html [emphasis added - PDN]