One further aspect of ‘transposing’ rail occurred to me yesterday, while viewing the display of a short [like 10 ft. long] segment of superelevated track with curve-worn rails in the museum at the Horse Shoe Curve Visitor’s Center:
First, ‘transposing’ rails means to switch or interchange the left and right - or ‘high’ and ‘low’, or ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ rails of a curve. It is done by sliding the outer rail over to the inner rail location, and vice-versa. Think of a large, long capital letter ‘X’ - that’s what it looks like in the middle of the process, if done simultaneously.
VERY common to see adjoining strings of welded rail bolted/barred together like what tree shows until it’s boutet’ed together (thus the thick weld versus the almost flush flash-butt arcweld). Also common in these cases not to drill the center two drill holes for a six hole bar.
Some folks have never seen a “Bulldog bar” it sounds like.
Old rule of thumb was no welds within 3 inches of a bolthole and crop 3 feet off old rail before flashbutt welding old rail into secondhand CWR.
Tree: looks like you got some of the last open hearth (OH) rail before the mills went to controlled cooling (CC) in the mills for mainline use. 112 is still pretty good stuff. (I see the tie pecker has been by)
And there were a lot of those marks. The tie gang has their work cut of for them. Also may explain why track speed on most of the line has been reduced from 40 to 25…
Hmmmm: some 800-1000+ tie miles ro renew? (out of a total 3250 ties/mile)
PDN: slashes are the month it was rolled (////=April); you were wandering into the “Heat Number” branding stamped into the opposite side of the rail…With OH you had a higher chance of mill defects and us mudchickens used to keep an eye on what OH heat numbers (serial numbers & ingot info) had a high failure rate as late as 1990. Anybody remember the bad Bethlehem CWR laid on Tehachapi in the early 1990’s?
mudchicken - Thank you ! [tup] [beat me to it] The heat/ bloom number is usually stamped/ indented inwards, in my experience; the rolling marks are always raised, as shown here. Now we need a photo of the heat number to compete this lesson . . .
OK - It was the shady side of the rail (although I added flash, or you wouldn’t see it at all), I got something. I also upped the contrast a bit, so don’t judge the rail by the color… This is from the stick of rail with bolt holes on both ends.
I think I’m seeing CC8?35111. The question mark is a spot I can’t read. It could be blank.
I’d have stayed there longer, but there were weed weasels lurking and it wasn’t “my” railroad…
From my previous post - the ‘CC’ stands for ‘Control Cooled’ = a way of cooling the rail slowly and more evenly than just air-cooling, to minimize the inclusion of hydrogen gas bubbles [really bad news].
The string of numbers - the ‘heat number’ - is the rail equivalent of a Serial Number on a machine or piece of equipment, for quality control and tracking purposes, etc. While some rail mills may have had a code or logic to the sequence of numbers, I 'm not aware of a general or universal system for that, or one that was used by either of these 2 mills.
I can’t figure out what’s in the missing space, either. Usually these are easier to read and decipher when you can rub the long sides of a piece of ‘keel’ = Yellow Lumber Crayon or white soapstone or chalk, etc. over that portion of the rail, which obviously you couldn’t do anyone in those circumstances. Or, use a wire brush to clean it up a little and bring out more of the ‘relief’ or texture of the surfaces. The other trick is to hold a flashlight - or in your case, the flashgun - at a shallow angle to the rail, instead of head-on or directly at it, again to emphasize the relief/ texture. Finally, if you know or can read or partially decipher the same numbers on the adjoining rails, that can makes it a lot easier to figure out what the numbers on this rail are supposed to be - likely only the last digit or two is changing from rail-to-rail.
Thanks again, Larry. I’ll see if I can find a good specimen from around here as well.
Based on the fact the the rails from two different mills (the first pictures I posted) were adjoining, I think I’d be a while finding two rails from the same mill to compare. I strongly suspect that the welded rail on this particular line came from all over some system or another. If it dates from Conrail days, it may well have come from different railroads. I don’t know when it was laid in its current form.
I’ll be on the Adirondack this weekend. I’ve got the run of the place, so I can do some better research. While PC and Conrail did operate the line, I suspect it’s more purely NYC than others may be, especially if I go north a little ways.
Well, I don’t know about that - but I was just commenting on one way how to deal with that deciphering challenge in the ‘real world’ - not suggesting that you need to do that, esp. in view of the ‘weed weasel’ conditions you encountered. 112 RE isn’t all that common a rail section here in the eastern U.S., and it’s more than plausible that those mills were the only ones or made a majority of the rails that were assembled into that CWR string. It would take someone with a better sense and understanding of the mathematics of ‘permutations and combinations’ - i.e., ‘chance’ events - than I have to be able to explain this principle clearly and correctly, but: If you were going to go back there, I’d be willing to bet that most of the adjoining rails would be from one of those 2 mills or the other, and not from a 3rd or even a 4th rail mill. As long as it doesn’t have to be a specific one of those first 2 mills, it’s a lot easier to find a match for either one, than just one of them. In an attempt to use a card analogy - if you were holding 2 cards at random, you just need to draw another card from the same suit [i.e., the ‘diamonds’] as either one of the 2 cards you’re holding - you don’t need to match their ‘rank’ [‘Ace’, etc.].
I’m bushed right now, but I’ll get some pics on line in the morning, if anything useful came out.
I did find one stick of Dudley on our siding at Otter Lake (which was re-installed within the past 10 years or so), which is likely relay.
The main, however, seems to have been completely overhauled by NYC sometime in the early 1920’s. The rail is almost entirely 105 lb rolled by Lackawanna in 1920 - too consistent to be relay. Couldn’t find the heat marks. I need to take a crayon with me next time, too.
