If welded rail is jointed track welded together and ribbon rail is about the same length. Why did railroads use welded rail instead of ribbon rail? Was ribbon rail available when welded was? It would seem to me that welded rail would be more expensive.
Welded rail and ribbon rail are synonymous. Perhaps the difference is that one term is used to describe jointed rail that is welded in place in the field and the other is used to describe rail welded in quarter-mile lengths at a plant and shipped to the location in special m/w cars.
Paul - has it always been that way? Back in the steam/first diesel, did they have ribbon rail?
The Nickel Plate installed two miles of ribbon rail at Millers City in 1951 but they didn’t follow through with anymore. I think, based on personal experience, that the large installations of ribbon rail didn’t come until the 1970’s.
The reason I asked is that the CSX line west of Cincinnati has both. Just wondering why? Have seen dates on rail of 1977. Is there much cost difference?
Welded rail may have already been in place as jointed rail. I watched a project on the BN Avard line many years ago, before BNSF, where they were welding the jointed rail in place.
There is some welded rail in my area that was obviously originally stick rail, including holes for bolting it together - dates on the sides of the rails run back into the 1940’s and are not consistant from one old length to the next. One conclusion would be that this rail was replaced with welded rail someplace else, then the rail was welded at a plant and installed where it is now. Or it was simply welded in place, although that would be quite time consuming and tie the line up for extended periods of time. Anybody know how long it takes to weld rail together in the field?
It’s been a long time since I watched the Avard project and things are a little fuzzy but it seems like they were using a machine. They were moving at a pretty good clip using four to six hour blocks of time. They ran most of the trains at night during the project.
Just ran across a reference (quite by accident, I assure you!) to an installation of field welded CWR on the Pere Marquette RR near Beech, Michigan in the 1930’s. Quite an interesting installation. Work was done in 1933 and 1935
Denver & Rio Grande Western had rail in a tunnel somewhere (Moffatt?) that was welded during WWII. Believe it was welded in place or done in the field, since welded rail was very unusual at the time. Also believe it was done due to decreased maintenance needs, to keep the tunnel available for trains more of the time.
Field welding stick rail is a rather common practice now. I have lost the URL but Mark Hemphill pointed out a site of a company that has developed the equipment and does field welding.
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The point of ALL welded rail has been to reduce maintence needs.; and on a daily basis the pounding that always occurs at any rail joint occurs at a vastly reduced number of locations per mile of track. However, there is a down side, despite all their efforts the railroads have yet to truly MASTER the expansion and contraction effects of rapid temperature changes and will end up with broken rails and pulled apart joints when rapid cooling has taken place and will also end up with ‘sun kinked’ segments of track when rapid temperature rise causes the rail to expand in length. Many tools and strategys have been applied to these problems but they still exist in varying degrees. There is one reality that never wavers…when any of the bad effects occur it will be when the operation of the line segment can least afford it.
You can always count on having a number of broken rails in the wintertime or when the weather cools, seems like. The old heads claimed they seldom ever heard of broken rails until the ribbon rail came along. I know they had to have them, though.
The old heads may never have heard of broken rails – but an awful lot of them went on the ground because of them, even so. If anything, they were more common, but not so much because of CWR vs. stick rail, but because of less sophisticated rail defect detecting equipment and… because many of the breaks occured (and still do occur) right in the vicinity of a joint. The most common scenario is a crack developing at a track bolt which isn’t quite tight, from something called fretting, and then progressing – helped along by the impact which inevitably occurs at a joint – in a process called fatigue failure – until a chunk of rail pops out under a train. And off you go into the weeds. Defect detectors have a hard time finding this type of cracking, because of the irregularities at joints.
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QUOTE: Originally posted by jchnhtfd
The old heads may never have heard of broken rails – but an awful lot of them went on the ground because of them, even so. If anything,
Well, I did say seldom and I do agree with everything you said.
The best joint is the one you remove. CWR, as with any technology, has its own unique set of positives and negatives. However, the positives of CWR far out weigh the negatives of jointed rail in today’s railroad world. Properly maintained track, of whatever rail type, is not a problem. That is the key–proper maintenance. Here you get into the economic questions.
The company that does the most in track welding of rail is Holland, now part of Progress Rail. There are others also.
Most railroads have established programs where they either will replace jointed rail with CWR welded in a plant and then pick up the old rail and cycle it through the plant to make more CWR for secondary lines. Many use Holland to do the work in track where they cut off the bolted area, pull the rails together and wled them. The cycle time for this is typically just a few minutes. The drawback here is the amount of track time you are given to work each day that drives the economic decision whether to do it that way or with a conventional rail gang.
A little bit of rail lore, whether precisely true or apocryphal I will leave to you to decide–
Do you know why rails typically came in 39’ lengths? Because that is what would fit in the standard 40’ gon.
Do you know why the standard CWR string is 1/4 mile long? That is the longest train that could fit on the track where one of the earliest production welding sites was built. (ATSF, I think)
Steve,
Your #1 is true, except the gondola portion. I have also seen rail move on flat cars and suspect it has for some time. Older standard lengths were 36’ and 33’ which were common car lengths of earlier eras.
#2 sounds like it could be true, but I would retain a bit of doubt.
Mac