Watching the Roanoke railcam just now I saw 3 MOW workers using a large truck with a remote control crane (boom?) to pick up several sticks of rail (39-ft long I assume) already on the ground and move them over about 4 or 5 feet (a profitable activity to be sure [?]).
What got me is that they didn’t have to adjust the pickup point such that the stick was perfectly balanced and neither end drug the ground as they moved it. One workman did seem to steady the end of the stick once and kicked at another to adjust its position on the ground when it was being placed, but other than that, the fellow placing the clamp to pick up the stick managed to hit the center close enough that the load was balanced.
How’d he do that? Is there a mark someplace on the rail that effectively says, ‘Pickup -->X<-- here’, or are they just that good at estimating the center of a 39-foot long section? (I have seen this done many times before, both in video’s and in-person and have not been able to understand their accuracy.)
Friend of my has the eye to accurately judge toe alignment on race cars to the 1/32nd of a inch. Take the car to him for a alignment - he will look at it - say it’s 1/16th toe out - put the tapes on the car and it’s 1/16th toe out. Some people through skill and experience see these thing - others (like me) don’t,
The video of the tie crew kinda showed this, too. I’m sure I’d be much less proficient at both removing the old ties, and inserting the new. Those guys made it look easy.
The rails may have already been marked with a “center-length” mark. It wouldn’t have to be much, and you might not have seen it - just a short dash of lumber crayon (“keel”) in yellow is most common. After all, almost everyone handling that rail since its manufacture would need to know where that point is. So as long as someone had previously marked the balanced lifting point, everyone else would know to look for it and utilize it. Measuring and marking the rails that way is a common task - usually done when the foreman is measuring the rails to see just what he has in the way of lengths - so he isn’t unpleasantly surprised when what looked like a 39 ft. long rail turns out to be only 37 ft. long, or similar . . . . [oops]
Also, the “rail tongs” that are commonly used to lift rail do not lift at a just a single narrow “point”. Instead, they have a short length of flat surface and a “U”- or channel-shape in their jaws that restrains the rail against tilting too much, as long as it’s not too far out of balance. See this photo (not mine) and brochure for a close-up example:
(1) Gee Paul… Ya coulda shown the self threading kind of burro tongs and really confused 'em. (no ground monkey needed to hook on, needle nosed version of what you showed)
(2) speed swings and knucle booms with fixed ends can fulcrum the rail against another part of the boom and you do not need to hook the middle of the rail. Speed swings (one of Mookie’s favorite tonka toys) has a broad flat joint in the middle of the boom for just that reason…