Mark, looking at that photo just makes me want to be there…[^]
I noticed the nice clean ballast on the right switch, is there a reason they would ballast just inside the rails?
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That’s almost certainly stone dropped for maintenance top up… may be run off of material surplaus to another job as I suggested above… nice to find a picture that shows it.
More thoughts…
To be pedantic “trackwork” includes ballast. It could be argued that it also includes the formation beneath the ballast as well.
Working upwards we start with the planet… which may have been amended to put the railway where it is wanted. This means cuts, fills and grades.
These days there may be a synthetic membrane between the planet and the first part of the formation. Different membranes are used to solve different civil engineering issues.
The ballast is then built up in several layers in a similar way to the way a highway is built up. Periodically track… the whole track down to the planet… may be dug out, disposed of and replaced. I’ve seen this done. Somewhere I have some photos… but mainly of the trains and machinery. It took from Friday midnight through Sunday night to do one of two tracks over about a mile and a half.
Drains can be built into this stage of the work… these days these are prequently flexible plastic (ribbed crossways) black tubes with holes in to let the water in… water takes the easiest route. These tubes are often seen waiting use in certain yards. “Offcuts” also can be seen. I would be very surprised if the same doesn’t happen in the US … and Canada. If you can work out how to do it it would make a very modern statement in a MoW yard. Not so long ago concrete sections were used to form drains… before that they were commonly brick (hard engineering bricks). Corugated steel has also been used… I suspect that it is the most short lived.
That highlights the formation’s importance for drainage. The role of ballast for drainage is vital. Think of the way any local unsurfaced road cuts up and becomes all humps and hollows as soon as it gets a serious combination of rain and traffic.
A large part of what railways are about is spreading the load transmitted through the wheels before it bears on the planet… in fact track is a continuous series of br
Great stuff David!!! I always like to know the “physics and history” behind stuff in our hobby.