I don’t work in the building industry, but I would opine that the railroads have done about as much rebuilding as the highway industry. It’s just that it’s done differently.
With a highway, you can’t go in and redo the substructure without destroying the top layers. With a railroad, you can do the work incrementally - replace ties, then clean the ballast, then tamp, and later replace the rails as needed without substantially damaging the substructure.
I suppose replacing the rails would be roughly analogous to capping an asphalt road. Same with “surfacing.”
The track structure generally is usable, albeit at reduced speeds, right up until it falls apart. A road surface that is failing may become impassable due to the failures of the pavement (potholes, etc).
Kinda like that car that’s all original, except that most of the parts have been replaced over time because they wore out, but not all at once.
The highways (and airports) have seen a huge change in the traffic they handle. Nevermind wear and tear, the weights and traffic levels of today are so much greater than 125 years ago that the old Macadam road, built to
With all due respects to the previous postings (I learn a lot from their knowledge and insights), I don’t think that there were too many airport runways 125 years ago.
While I don’t take as much of an interest in M/W work as some of the others, I’m still fascinated by the equipment used by a modern mechanized M/W crew. I’m also curious as to what sort of equipment replaced Jordan Spreaders.
I think the railroads were built a little stouter to start with. For example, the Great Northern built into our city sometime in the 1880’s. A lot of that line today still untilizes small bridges and culverts made out of pink Sioux Quartzite rock. How many airports can lay the same claim? [:-,]
I don’t think any of the airports built in the 1880’s can lay the same claim.
I once heard on Jay Leno’s Tonight show about a plane that landed “in an unpaved section of the airport”. Jay’s comment was that if it was an unpaved part then it didn’t land, it crashed.
I told someone that story, and added that when I landed on the island Mustique in St Vincent and the Grenadines that the runways were unpaved. She told me that when she landed at Wings Field in Bluebell PA she told the pilot “we can’t land there, it’s grass.”
Maintenance doesn’t exist in many people’s minds these days. Around 1990, all of the St. Charles streetcar tracks in New Orleans were removed and replaced with CWR and ties of some African wood that was supposed to be rot-resistant. A few years ago they realized that rot-resistant did not mean rot-proof and they had to replace them with concrete ties. I heard one television commentator say, “And to think, the original ties lasted 150 years.”
I’ve been fascinated by track maintenance since I was in high school back in the late '50’s when I came across a track gang at work. They had a machine to replace the ties, one to drive the spikes, and one to tamp the ballast. They used an optical system to level the track: a supervisor would go ahead, put a cushion on the ballast, sit on it and bend over to sight along the rail. The spike driving machine apparently couldn’t handle the spikes at the joints, so these were driven by two big laborers with mauls. They would drive the spike on each side of the rail simultaneously, alternating their strokes. I noticed that when one finished driving the spike home, he would continue to swing, hitting the top of the rail until the other one finished. He would then hit the top of the rail and they both stopped. I’m guessing this was done to not break the rythm.
Azobe would have done just fine, but then the knucleheads buried them in asphalt and probably failed to drain the ballast section paved over. African hardwood ties are very dense, but not treated. They will resort to attracting water if it has nowhere else to go as they are fibrous vegetable matter. The results are predictable and the born yesterday “newsworker” was typically clueless.
MC, azobe sounds familiar. Most of the line is in the neutral ground (median) and is covered wih turf. The ballast has nowhere to drain to. Anyway, it lasted about 20 years. The 20 blocks that are downtown are in concrete with some kind of rubbery isolation and asphalt over and around it.
Fort Collins has the same headache plus others …Their 65# jointed rail has no EpFlex application that would work for it along Mountain Avenue. EpFlex is made for 115# rail and larger.