SRS test vehicles

Hartington · December 14, 2010, 3:40pm

The Sperry Rail website isn’t helping me to determine specifically what each of their rail borne vehicles does. For instance, SRS 119 is a converted doodlebug and appears to have one instrumented and one non instrumented truck. What does the instrumentation actually record?

As a follow up, do they operate a rail borne device that uses lasers to map the surrounding trackside buildings, platforms and the like to verify loading gauge?

Paul_D_North_Jr · December 14, 2010, 9:29pm

Have you looked at the “Sperry Railbound Inspection Vehicles” brochure (8 pgs., approx. 3.0 MB in size) ? See:

http://www.sperryrail.com/_customelements/uploadedResources/SperryRailbound.pdf

esp. pgs. 3 and 4 ? Also, the “Applied Technology” page and the 3 linked pages there, for Induction, Ultrasonics, and Vision, at -

http://www.sperryrail.com/applied_technology.html ?

Beyond that, for the capabilities of a speciifc car, you’d probably need an ‘inside source’ person of some kind. I believe the testing capabilities of the cars are frequently upgraded and modified, so they vary over time.

I’m not aware that Sperry does anything regarding measuring the loading gauge, and I didn’t see anything on their website that indicates they do.

Paul North.

mudchicken · December 15, 2010, 10:35am

Sperry Car 119 is an electromagnetic rail test car and has had lite-slice equipment mounted on it. (measuring rail head profile, corrugation and gage) The car has been modified and rebuilt so many times it no longer resembembles its Brill origins. Being that they cannot set-off the rail and are a pain to dispatchers, the Brill cars are much fewer in number these days. With the differences between electromagnetic and ultrasonic (like Herzog’s IC/ATSF technology) and the arrays used, will a combined car ever appear?

Sperry has had, on and off, two truck mounted measuring frames with digital scanners since the 1990’s (Think skew or sideways photogrammetry - Why does anything technical always imply lasers? [:-,])…With scanning technology taking a quantum leap over the past years (Like Union Pacific’s PMV vehicles, 6 highly modified suburbans), I would imagine SRS has something modified to fit their purposes on a Hi-Rail Clearance Car truck. The trick and the detail is how do you get from crappy GIS level precision down to engineering grade precision and down to first or zero order survey precision?..and what do you really need???)…It’s a long way from the old Bamboo peacocks that diningcar and I played with.

Paul_of_Covington · December 15, 2010, 12:22pm

Bamboo peacocks???

Paul_D_North_Jr · December 15, 2010, 1:39pm

Caught that one, did you ?

Some of the much older-style clearance measurement railcars had a frame on them that carried many ‘fingers’ or ‘feelers’ that would rotate inward when they hit a close point - the crew could then measure how far the tip was from the top of rail and center of track, etc. Here’s a link to a photo (not mine) of that part of one such car, apparently taken from the cupola of a following caboose:

http://www.northeast.railfan.net/images/prr497125a.jpg

There must be better images out there someplace . . .