Potholes

[mudchicken]

He’s also been out there ahead of time with a box full of 60d nails/boat-spikes… putting them in mudholes under the rail and at approaches to certain notorious crossings and bridges —seeing what the deflections are like, are they uniform and checking against past behavior…

Them Mark-ONE eyeballs do funny things whn you’ve been out all night chasing raindrops…

Those track supervisors, foremen, roadmasters et al are not being silly when they straddle the rail, bend over and look between their legs…they are getting rid of parallax and other things the brain tries to compensate for so he/she gets an honest view of the track.

You can’t become a track expert overnight. It takes practical experience.

[Murphy_Siding]

If you’re a trackman for a railroad, you know your job, you are doing your job because you know your job. You have ditch by ditch, tie by tie experience, youy’ve worked it and learned it. You are a professional, you are dedicated, you are expert in your field (Right Of Way). You inspect, you find faults or not, you make your judgement and pass it on to the brass. If you’re right your a hero and work again tomorrow; if you’re wrong you now used to be a trackman.

Why do you think they have such jobs? If a railroad didn’t know that having a trackman inspecting the track wasn’t the cautious and cheapest way to know what’s under wheel, they wouldn’t hire somebody to do the expert job.

Hmmmm?

I don’t quite understand your answer. Maybe I wasn’t too clear in my question. I was trying to get an understanding about who made the determinations about speed reductions and needed repairs, and how they went about doing that. Mudchicken, in a post above, spelled it our pretty clear for my mind.

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

If I ever get around to taking a photo for my own personal ‘avatar’ here, I’m thinking it would be one of me ‘sighting down the rail’ as described. MC’s already got the transit/ total station concept claimed, and somehow sitting in front of a computer or looking at a roll of plans - however correct and true-to-life that may actually be - just doesn’t have the same flavor and credibility to it.

• Paul North.

[blue_streak_1]

So what it comes down to is experience in ‘eyeing up the rail’, which results in the ‘‘Mark I calibrated eyeball’’. You can tell an experienced trackman because what he’ll do is stand outside the track, kneel down and bend over and stick his head down inside the near rail, and sight down it to look for irregularities. With some experience that simple procedure takes only a few seconds, and can identify and roughly quanitfy the worst problem areas for at least 100 ft. on most curves, and maybe several hundred yards on tangents. That’s about all that can be done for surface dips = along the length of the track; if a cross-level problem is noted, then get out the track level and put it across the rails, see what it reads, and be guided accordingly.

• Paul North.

Paul. Has anyone ever made a Hi-Rail vehicle that has a double mirror setup on the front of the truck that would give the inspector a rail - head view of the track ahead?

[Boyd]

Can track get bumpy enough for couplers to separate vertically?

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

Paul. Has anyone ever made a Hi-Rail vehicle that has a double mirror setup on the front of the truck that would give the inspector a rail - head view of the track ahead?

No, not so far as I know or recall. Back in the day, a ‘speeder’ was also low enough - and unsprung - to provide almost the same view.

These days, I’d instead mount a video camera down on the hi-rail gear for that view, with a monitor display in the cab. With a zoom / telephoto feature, that would help to idenitfy the irregularities.

But for a really experienced person - and with the good generally smooth condition of most main lines today - who also knows the territory and the traditional problem locations, that sophisticated technology really isn’t needed - you can usually see the dips that are severe enough to be an operating or safety problem coming up well enough even from up in the truck cab.

• Paul North.

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

Can track get bumpy enough for couplers to separate vertically?

Definitely yes. Also, grade crossings can get humped enough - or the approaches settle enough - for the air hoses to snag or get smacked hard enough to separate or break, which causes an emergency brake application.

• Paul North.

[henry6]

My reference to trackmen earlier was that if they are on duty as trackmen they certainly have to be qualified to make a judgement on track condition and speed restrictions if any otherwise they are not qualified to do the job.

Break aparts can come from bad track by hoses disconnecting and even couplers jumping. I feared tht once along the Susquehanna River south of Wilkes Barre, PA when a southbound PC freight came at us where there is the river, the single track, the road, and a sheer straight up wall of rock. The train was doing at least 55 mph. Instead of swaying side to side it was actually leaping forward!