Last night talking to a friend who works for the RR. He told me about ribbon rail. He said it is made in lengthes that are up to a mile long and taken from the steel mill and transproted via rail directly to the site to be installed. First question ; is this true or am I getting my leg pulled ? If true haw does one get it off of the train and in place. I would imagine a mile long rail is pretty difficult to handle ???
Do a Google and/or Wikipedia search for ribbon rail, you’ll get a whole lot of answers.
Here’s a Youtube video showing ribbon rail being transported by train…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InuorFIkBXY
Wayne
Ribbonrail, or, more accurately, continuous welded rail, is old technology. As the video showed it is handled in special trains of cars designed to allow it to flex and move in transit.
Rail is much more flexible than most people realize. If it is not firmly anchored to a myriad of ties it will squirm around mainline curves like a snake, even when transported twenty or more lengths at a time.
There is one problem with trying to model this. Scale rail is orders of magnitude stiffer than the full-scale type. Maybe some manufacturer would consider making Code 83 rail available in rubber…
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with CWR in place on the ROW but not yet laid)
Near here they are upgrading the track. According to the TV news, the sections they are putting down are 1600’ each. They showed them attaching a chain to the rail, then the train moving away slid the rail off the cars. I saw the new rails laying next to the existing tracks, awaiting the crew to remove the old and attach the new. Quite the hunks of steel.
Have fun,
Richard
When I was in college, I lived about a four of a mile from some UP tracks that were being upgraded in this matter. The noise those things make when the are unloaded is really loud and squeaky. Good thing they only did that during the day when I was in class and at work.
Normally a train would handle 1/4 mile lengths, and 30-40 rails per train. The rails on the train are tied down in the middle and allowed to move on either end to allow for flexing as the train goes around curves.
Unloading is simple. You chain the end of a rail to the existing track, unsecure it from the middle and then move the train out from under the rail. The trickier part are the rail pickup trains that pick up the old jointed or continuous welded rail and load it onto a train. The have a Power car that lifts the rail up and feeds it onto the train.
Never heard of rail longer than 1/4 mile.
The fun part of laying welded rail is making the field welds. ‘Back in the day’, this was done by clamping a mold around the two ends to be joined, filling it with a thermite powder (yeah, just like the filling of a thermite grenade), and lighting it off. Instant volcano! The thermite developed temperatures high enough to literally melt the two ends together. After allowing the ends to cool, half a hour or so with a grinder would produce a perfectly smooth rail head. You could always find these joints, though, by looking for a 1/4" weld seam on both sides of the rail web and on the base. I don’t know if the process has changed much but I expect you can still find those seams if you look.
Field welds are still made with thermite, it also has steel mixed in with the powder so not only does it melt the rail ends, but it fills the gap between the rails with molten steel.
In addition there are portable electric butt welders that resistance weld the ends of the rail together, much the same way factory welds are made.
I expect there was steel in the mix ‘back in the day’ too. I recall track gangs being very concerned about the alignment of the ends but not being very worried about the gap between them. 1/2" or so seemed to be OK.
A lot of the welded rail I saw installed was ‘re-lay’ rail. This was typically jointed rail that had been replaced at some other location. The bolt holes were cropped, the rail was straightened as needed, the rail heads were reground to shape, the rail was welded into 1/4 mile strings, and the strings were shipped on the special trains described elsewhere to their new home.
Back in the 1960s the B&O was using thermite welding.
As mentioned above, the rail was carefully prepared and aligned and the two mold halves were clamped around the rails. Then a “crucible” was set on top of the mold. The powder came in two bags: a larger lightweight bag “the aluminum”, and a smaller heavy bag “the iron”. The contents of the bags were poured into the crucible at the same time to mix them together. Then a magnesium strip was stuck into the powder and ignited with a flint striker. As the welder quickly retreated, the reaction took place, liberating a great deal of light and heat. It was a good idea to have enough trackmen on hand to put out any brush fires that might occur.
BTW the signal maintainers used a much smaller thermite set-up to braze the bond wires at rail joints.
I believe a couple years ago Dirty Jobs did a thing with a rail crew and they did the thermite welding just like described above. So it appears that is still the way to do it.
I saw a work train dropping continuous welded rail on the old Santa Fe south of Temple, TX a couple of weeks ago. The train had an old BN extended cupola caboose on the rear…
Your memory is clearer than mine, DSO, but I’m sure we’re talking about the same process. I saw a “System Gang” weld rail like this when the NYC’s Ashtabula Branch (Ashtabula to Youngstown, OH) was being upgraded. I believe that would have been the summer of 1967 or 1968, probably the latter. I managed to crush my thumb by ‘boxing’ a rail anchor against a tie…with my thumb in between. [oops]
The crucible I remember was funnel shaped although it was heavy enough to contain the miniature volcano of field welding.
I don’t remember any brush fire problem. Although that summer was hot and dry, the Ashtabula Branch was pretty much weed free with the ROW being cleared at least 25’ on either side of the ballast.
It was the same process, but on the B&O they were using a crucible that was cylindrical maybe about 12" in diameter and the top of the mold had a funnel shape to it. IIRC the same molds could be used for 131# and 140# rail. Was that really 45 years ago?
A couple weeks ago saw an Amtrak track gang preparing a joint for thermite welding in a shop area. It looked like they were using a powder that came all in one bag. Didn’t stick around to watch the weld as it was getting close to lunchtime[dinner]
Here’s a You-Tube video of a thermite field welding.
I have a set of pictures of a site welds being made at Crewe. Different country but the same process.
The thing that no-one has mentioned so far is that there is a fire-brick mold that is clamped around the rail ends so that the molten steel goes and stays where it is wanted - provided that the mould has been fitted and plugged correctly - I have pics of what happens when this goes wrong…
If someone would like to provide me with an e mail to mail the pics to and then post them I will look the pics out and they can be shared…
[8D]
Yes, it is amazing how much like limp spaghetti real rail can be! Chuck’s idea of rubber rail is intriguing – a reminder that during WWII one outfit actually made rail out of milled wood – because brass was diverted for war production. the idea was that you could glean bits and pieces of usable brass from your layout by replacing the ends of sidings and guard rails on bridges with the wood rail.
I wonder if you could mimic CWR with small Plastruct I or T sections because the smallest sizes have the kind of flexibility to go around a bend without derailing the cars.
Dave Nelson
You might have something there, Dave. Whatever size I or T sections would be closest to .083 or even somewhat larger would most likely pass the 3’ rule. I’d also bet that welding them end-to-end with acetone- or ketone-based liquid cement could give you a 1/4 mile string that would be very strong.
Of course, that 1/4 mile string would be a bit over 15 feet long so handling it might be a problem. But that string would certainly handle our curves without derailing any of the 24 53’ flats needed to carry it. You might still have a problem with flexibility when you load 24 cars with 60 strings (see http://www.hollandco.com/equipment/rail-handling/rail-trains).
24 53’ flats? 60 x 15’ of Plastruct I or T section? WOW! That would be a pretty expensive train! [:|]
It sure would – I am full of good ideas when i am spending someone else’s money [:-,] That’s why televised poker is so popular –
Almost anything that looks like a milled shape is going to look like rail from a distance, and not just 3 feet either, because most modelers would quickly grasp what it is you are modeling. Their minds will make it look like rail to them. And by no means does a train have to be the full 1/4 mile=15 feet long to look real. All it has to do is look like a long train. Look how many guys have three engines pulling 10 car trains. It needs to be long enough to snake through a curve and look like a long train compared to your other “long” (i.e., not really long at all) trains.
Even if your layout has Code 100 rail a CWR train with Code 40 rail would get the point across. I wonder if two 3 foot pieces of Code 40 soldered together would be flexible enough to go around a curve, if one end was fasted to the first car and the rest of the rails were allowed to slide throught the “fingers” on the following cars.
Dave Nelson