The $500,000 Gaffe That Left $5-Million Delaware Rail Bridge Coming Up Inches Short for Double-Decker Trains
Whoops!
“The Delaware Department of Transportation spent more than $5 million in 2011 to accommodate these trains by rebuilding the overpass, reported The News Journal. They think they know what caused the error: surveyors mistakenly measured the clearance from the ground up, rather than from the top of the track’s steel rails, said Barry Benton, DelDOT’s state bridge engineer.”
Five years of finger pointing later, “it’s a learning experience”. Somebody had some ‘splainin’ to do on this.
Seems like lowering the tracks would be easier …, but they were probably there first
Lowest bidding surveyors, who knew nothing about basic clearance facts?
DelDOT employees …
That’s probably implicit in the ‘waiver’ that DelDOT requested from CSX: the idea that lowering the track as for tunnel clearance might be less expensive than jacking the bridge and reprofiling the pavement.
Aside from the time and lost capacity to do that, however, is the problem when a sag is introduced at a given point. The amount of additional fuel burn is probably not that great; the difficulty is the load coming on and off the couplers and draft gear, especially when changing speed or conducting hard braking.
Wiser to change the bridge, even if it were possible to get more than usual ‘goodwill’ out of Delaware with the track accommodation…
PDN: Where art thou?
Congrats to CSX for sticking to their guns on 21’-6" (Maybe the rubber tired-bubbas ought to design to 23’-0", CSX’s general requirement? What they would have seen if they had properly gathered all the required/suggested design guidelines before they started guessing at a solution? CSX makes it abundantly clear that they will share requirements (current) with any structural designer for the price of an e-mail.
(1) Pretty clear that it isn’t the surveyors. The project design engineers pooped in their own nest. Designing to the absolute MINIMUM standard is just plain stupid. (No allowance for normal railroad surfacing is just plain nuts) The engineers detail what data is supposed to be collected for an engineering topo on a project like that. If they had any quibbles, a survey crew would have been sent back out to collect that data. Palming the blame off on the surveyors is arrogant chickencrap…que up Strother Martin, please.(Cool Hand Luke)
(2) State of Delaware has a problem in that it buried in its regulations (an obscure DelDOT design Memo of 3-22-83) DELDOT VIOLATED ITS OWN STATE RULES! Like the failure in Iowa with the pedestrian bridge (Cedar Rapids ?), make the statute rules a little more accessable for da button pushers. Otherwise, they will guess and blunder their way to a finished project. (Fairly common for highway bubbas to screw-up around railroads - see it plenty often where I’m at… Railroad design almost became a lost art in recent history.)
(3) Funny the newspaper journalists newsworkers running off to quiz ASCE on the clearance issue. They should have talked to AREMA Committee 28 (ASCE has had little to do with the common carrier freight railroads for over a century - The industry basically fired them over a century ago after a series of ASCE mis-steps and clashes between practical railroaders
What do you call palming it off on the construction crews not compensating for the effect of the deck on the precast beams, as he did a little later?
And why is the bridge NOT built to 23’ as CSX standards indicate? Isn’t the extra there so that a few cycles of ‘ballast regulation’ and lining/surfacing won’t lift the track into potential interference?
I too will be interested to see what PDN has to say about this.
6" of that 23ft. is “insurance” from the model law of the 1950’s that specifies 22’-6"…some states back east allow lesser separation based on older standards which have already caused some severe headaches in the eastern states.
As to how you fault a bridge contractor’s employee’s for designed deflection under load [^o)] [^o)][%-)]…probably bit into the PTC fairy tale too.
Words fail me - my mind can’t wrap around this - time doesn’t allow me - to digest this and comment in proper form right now. I couldn’t invent this stuff. April Fool’s was almost 2 months ago ! This is almost as bad as the cartoon of the tracks where the left rail joins with the right rail, and the opposite rails are hanging free and unconnected to anything . . .
MC has addressed all the important points. It’s a design error - probably rooted in a failure to understand ‘railroad’, compounded by failure to provide adequate directon and review to ensure the quality and method of measurements from the surveyors (see LeMassena’s essay on “Numbers” in Trains many years back). I will add one comment - from the linked article:
“Benton said a new DelDOT policy requires surveyors to take three measurements when judging clearances from railroad tracks — one on each side of the rail, and one on top of the rail.”
To me, that’s still 2/3 wrong. Instead, ‘shoot’ the elevations of the tops of both rails, and forgot the ‘on each side’ part except as a check: the rail section height + tieplate thickness - tieplate cutting will give a better value faster; and if it’s concrete ties, then where the heck do they measure on all those sloped and angled surfaces ?
Somewhere in the professional licensing regulations is a requirement to not practice in a discipline in which you’re not qualified . . . “A man’s got to know his limitations” (by Clint Eastwood as “Dirty Harry” in one of those movies).
My question is, DDot paid CSX a ton of money to review their plans before granting a license for the work. AECOM in Philly was who CSX always foisted this review work on on my projects. No one in this review process for CSX caught the bad design before they approved these plans?
Similar thing happened here for the pedestrian walkway over a RR track, from a parking garage to the new library. The architect and construction folk were let off the hook because the RR signed off on the design and it was built to that design. The problem here was that the RR did track/ballast refurbishment between the time the design was approved and the construction was completed.
So I have a question here… didn’t CSX sign off on the design??? I would not be so critical of the DelDOT designers… CSX bears some responsibility for this!
Magnum Force. It’s my favorite Dirty Harry movie.
Thank you for the insight Mr. North and Mudchicken …
Found a link to the “Jacking Plan” for the span on the DelDOT website.
https://www.deldot.gov/information/projects/bridges/br_1-651/vw/index.shtml
This time it was the State of Delaware’s DOT that got the Official “Smooched the Pooch” Award.[:^)] It is stunning how often the “Rubber-tire’d Bubbas make mistakes in Measuring ‘Stuff’ that they should know can be critical to their operations. ie- a 4” asphalt over-lay under a bridge that was previously marked at 13’6", just removing the white warning sign for 13’6" DOES NOT automatically, make that clearance OK. A state saving money by building bridges at the absolute minimum for highway clearance, does not relieve them from having to consider the new cl
SV:
(1) Somehow when the plan says 21’-6", it should not be 21’-1". I do not think the DelDOT bridge design people are off the hook. (From what we get to see checking designs for my clients, this is not an isolated case. Frequently get the grumble from the design engineer (and the State DOT rubber-tired folks of the technical persuasion) that the railroad comments in red ink are arbitrary (hardly) and they are just trying to be difficult (hardly, but the lack of professional thought around railroads by highway people is almost expected anymore).
(2) What bright bunny had DelDOT policing itself? It’s happening more and more as state governments try to streamline. The 1974 decision to pull railroad regulation out of the Delaware PSC and give it to DelDOT predictably backfired.
(3) CSX was told 21’-6" and expected 21’-6" or better. Damn right they balked at 21’-1". (CSX and AECOM are most certainly looking at what happened and reviewing procedure. CSX - JAX is already a tough customer with just about anything that crosses them, especially utilities which get really arrogant in their own right… After this, I think CSX and the other railroads will really dig in and DEMAND that the highway bubbas get it right.
Like Paul, I cannot grasp why these supposebly tech savvy folks cannot handle the concept of a clearance envelope. Bewildering.
Price to raise bridge seems excessive. When Ga DOT raised a bunch of bridges on I-85 south of Atlanta. The bridges were all raised about 18 inches for an overlay of the interstate. Price was about $150,000 per bridge. Of course it was in a rural areas and all that had to be added were steel columns on top of bents and paving new ramps to new heights. .
CSX sued DelDot about the previous Newport Rd. bridge, and 3 other old B&O bridges, when DelDot said CSX should pay for repairs.
Excerpt from U.S. District Court for District of Delaware, Dec. 12, 2003
DelDOT alleges that all four of the bridges are owned by CSX.2 In the July 7, 2003 letter, DelDOT claimed that it was forced to close three of the bridges in December 2002 due to their deteriorated condition, and that the fourth bridge was then restricted to vehicular traffic not exceeding three tons. DelDOT stated that CSX’s “consistent disregard for its responsibility to inspect, maintain, and upgrade these bridges” has endangered the traveling public, resulted in traffic detours that have prolonged emergency response time for fire, ambulance, and police personnel, and caused incalculable public convenience.
DelDOT also offered two options for resolution of the impasse. Under the first option, CSX would fund the design
“surveyors mistakenly measured the clearance from the ground up, rather than from the top of the track’s steel rails, said Barry Benton, DelDOT’s state bridge engineer”
Has anyone explained what this means? How did they actually position the overpass?
When you’re pouring concrete for a bridge abutment, you pour until it’s X feet higher than… well, for sure not X feet higher than the top of the rail. You pour until it’s X feet higher than some benchmark you have previously set in a convenient position off the track, out of harm’s way. You have showed the railroad guys your benchmark, and asked them: how much higher than the benchmark is the top of rail allowed to get? Today the top of rail is, say, 1 foot above the benchmark; can we overpass-builders assume the top of rail is never going to be more than 1.5 feet above the benchmark? Or 2.0 feet, or what?
Once the railroad has promised not to raise the top of rail more than Y feet above the benchmark, then you know how many feet above the benchmark the top of your abutment has to be.
So what part of the plan didn’t get done?
Based upon some dealings in these matters, I’d say, “none of the above.” Someone assumed the elevation they were given was all that was needed without question. Probably no-one in charge understood the variable nature of railroads. They assumed since the track has been there for decades, it’s always been ‘right there’, without moving.
It also sounds like CSX inherited a white elephant. (if they do actually own those bridges for some convoluted reason.)