Can someone help with terminology? What do you call the braided wire that connects the ends of two sections of bolted rail?
My old memory thanks you!
What I call it, and what we’re supposed to call it may be different, and my memory’s not necessarilly any younger than yours, but we live in such wonderous times that http://www.google.com/patents/US2834550 confirms that it’s called a “bond”
“This invention relates to a rail bond or track circuit connector and more particularly to a rail bond which passes behind or above a splice bar’connecting two rail ends. The type of rail bond usually used for this purpose consists of two terminal fittings at the end of a flexible stranded wire structure, which is required to resist the heavy vibrational stresses induced in the bond due to the passing of a train”
Note that it’s stranded, and usually twisted, not braided.
Our signal maintainers call them bond wires.
On electric railroads the bond wires are larger than signal bonds but vital to the electric lines. One clever way to tell of a rail came from an electric line is the size of the wire and the manner of attachment.
Bonding wire…
Bond wire - connection by drilling posts in the out(field) side of the ball now discouraged. posts are drilled or thermite soldered to the web.
You should see the size of the ones used on heavy commuter/ rapid transit lines. One installation* I did had a pair of them at each joint, each bond wire being about 1 inch in diameter.
*Test track on the northwestern side of CSX at Twin Oaks, PA, about 0.3 mile east of the US 322 overpass.
- Paul North.
All of the ground connections for a radio tower site I’m familiar with were thermite bonded. I’m pretty sure the one for the LP tank (backup power) was done before the tank was filled…
I would hope so. Anyway, got stuck with a 45-minute delay on my ride home yesterday. Apparently, an eastbound NS freight lost its air and tied up Belt Junction until the problem could get corrected. Not nearly as bad as several years ago when a crew outlawed and tied us up for about two hours.
A case in point (also showing older ideas on where the bond goes):
This is ex-Pacific Electric.
Quoting CSSHegewisch:
“Not nearly as bad as several years ago when a crew outlawed and tied us up for about two hours.”
Were the outlaws caught and prosecuted for tying you up?
Was this a somewhat recent photo?
Johnny, this basically means that the crew on Paul’s train was “dead on the law”.
Being dead made them easy to catch and unnecessary to prosecute.
And I assume that once the law got out from under them, they proceeded to untie Paul and company.
Carl, a good response.
We were untied after a new crew was sent. I heard later that the dispatcher and other responsible parties were called on the carpet and fed to the terminal super for lunch.
It must have worked. A few months later, a similar situation came up and the freight was stopped short of Belt Junction before the crew outlawed.
There was a fairly recent thread somewhere that discussed ex-PE track, still in use for freight service at that time, which still displayed the heavy rail bonding from electric days. A photograph – either this one or one very like it – was in that thread. Instead of looking up the thread, I took the lazy way out, googled for the image, and just tinkered with the search terms until I saw a picture that illustrated what I wanted to show.
IIRC, there is still quite a bit of trackage ‘here and there’ in Southern California that has these bonds in place.
I think thats a neat bit of RR archeology.
The bonding wires on the Iowa Traction in Mason City Iowa are also of that significantly heavier nature – and that line is still under wire, although the actual area of rail service is evidently cut back for the rails are very rusty on the west end of the line.
Dave Nelson
Our trolley museum had heavy bonds installed and copper thieves helped themselves to them. We replaced them with signal bonds to reduce the temptation and so far so good. We live with the voltage drop. but we only go 2 miles. What made us mad was the thieves migt get a few bucks for the copper but we had all the labor to replace them. At least they didn’t touch the 600V. I was told by a utility man about some thieves that stole copper from a live substation and later, a burned body was found a couple of blocks away. No honor among thieves.
Pity the man who did not know what danger there is in high voltage electricity. Perhaps his cohorts now know.