This 1981 pic shows nice clean GP7s and masses of new ballast just dropped ready for spreading… possibly by hand?
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=134111
It’s really bad when you have to move around on foot on ballast like that.
The ballast was most likely spread by a flanger or ballast regulator and not by hand.
The GP7’s actually arent clean buuuut…lol Yes they would use a tamper.
Was there not a piece of equipment that would physically lift the track and ties while at the same time spread that new ballast under and through the ties to raise up the road bed?
Will
Yes - one of the first was the Mannix(sp?) machine. Expensive, but just did what you describe. It was used to lift the track, recover the ballast, clean it and put it back.
Jim
that is the way ballast looks when it is put down, i remember growing up watching the open bay hoppers drop ballast on the rails of SP’s Kerrville branch…it stayed like that for a long time and eventually it all setted into place a few months later,they used a tamper too but tamped the inside rail only…that was neat to watch when i was a kid… i’d sit by my fence for hours watching them do the ballast until they got around a curve and i couldn’t see it anymore…chuck
I hav that 3-DVD American Railroads set and on one of the films there is some good footage of an early 50’s tamper at work. Pretty neat actually, how it works. Seems slow, too - but having manual labor would be even slower.
–Randy
Brilliant responses folks 
I based my guess on hand spreading by the size of the pile down the middle and the fact that it looks like the track is a switch . A flanger would pu***hat lot all over the place.
Switches often require special tampers. A Tamper lifts and levels but doesn’t spread… we now have things we call “stone blowers” which pick up and redistribute the dropped ballast in a set profile. Tampers now not only line by lasers but use GPS as well. (When Isay they “level” that includes setting cants - super elevation-).
Then again I finally ended up close to one of the five car ballast hopper sets that carry a power plant… they discharge ballast according to instruction from a hand-held set pretty much like a DCC controller… bit different from the old days when guys rode the wagons and wound the doors open and shut by hand.
Any pictures of the Mannix machine(s)?
I like the poem.
Network Rail have put out a safety film called “Hit and Miss”… you know how Railroaders always talk… they don’t for half an hour or so after this film. It makes the point.
As they used to say in Hill Street Blues… “Let’s be careful out there”.
Thanks everyone
The lead GP7, at least, looks clean to me. And it should be, being that it had been in CNW paint for less than a year!
That is a nice quality picture. I had to print an 8x10 to hang in my train room. It printed great!
I saw some type of ballast spreading machine (no idea what it was) yesterday at the light rail station. (first time I’ve seen one) Our local rapid transit takes good care of their tracks, unlike our ‘real’ trains around here…I’m going to have to put tons of grass over my ballast just to make my layout look right! [8D]
Tukaram…
If you really want grassy ballast and haven’t started already I’d suggest using dyed sisal string (in UK we call it binder twine)… poke stubby lengths of it into glue between ties in clumps. When it’s hard trim it to length and then ballast pretty much as normal. It’s easier to ballast round/into grass than vice versa.
Have fun