How much stuff can actually be in the flangeways before a train derails? For example, say a dirt road crosses the tracks, and the dirt just barely covers the tracks due to road traffic. Can the crossing still safely be used by a train? What about some ballast on the tracks? Or dirt/rocks in the flangeways? What is acceptable and what is not?
It depends on what the “stuff” in the flangeway is for starters. Ice for example is always dangerous, a 150 ton locomotive can derail due to ice impacted in grade crossing flangeways. Unless frozen, powdery materials like dirt and sand usually pose little risk when left in flangeways because these substances are easily pushed aside or compressed by the weight of railroad rolling stock. Ballast covering the railhead can derail empty cars quite easily but this condition is seldom allowed to develop by the section crews who maintain the track.
Ice can derail a locomotive but when dealing with icy conditions, it’s sometimes the very best idea to take the engine in first and clear a pathway, so to speak, before shoving any freight cars into the track. A locomotive, if moved in slowly, will usually break enough of a path for any cars.
Of course, under extreme weather conditions, YMMV.
It is always fun to be in the engine, creep up on an ice-covered crossing, and feel the engine break through the ice down to the rail… [:O]
Need to chip out the crossings.
On this trip, there was rain a couple of days before. Turned into freezing rain, then the temps went to -10 or so. Crossings iced up like you wouldn’t believe. We were the first train through. A 2.5 hour trip took 2.5 days, 3 crews.
Regarding the above picture, wouldn’t it have just been easier to take a blowtorch and melt out the crossing?
When it’s -10 and the ice is next to a very cold rail, it takes an awful lot of heat to melt it. Then you have water in the flangeway with nowhere to go that freezes back in a few seconds…
By chipping it out, you get rid of the ice and nothing refreezes.
Switch heaters work because there is somewhere to drain the water.
Placing used spikes in the flangeways of diamonds seems to be a favorite of the “n’er do well” ers in these parts.
Sure, if you want a broken rail in your crossing in the middle of winter! Also, all the blowtorch will do is melt the surrounding snow and ice which will become water, temporarily, and run back into the flangeways reforming as ice exascerbating the problem. As they say on the Guiness commercial “BRILLIANT!!”
LC
…and set the ties and crossing planks on fire (unless the timber is almost new)…once started, hard to extinguish.