Trackwork

[nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org]

 Ron et al:

I should have added that track does still buckle, even with that 18" "shoulder" they now put on the "field" sides of the ties.  

That's why most railroads put out a "heat patrol" vehicle when the ambient temperature rises to 90 degrees.  Those heat patrols find a lot of little stuff... track that has moved four, six or eight inches laterally, before the movement is stopped by the weight of all the ballast stone.  Then a 10MPH slow order is put up for the night and the next day the section gang brings in a torsion beam to straighten out the kinked track, and a ballast regulator to get the stone back in place.

In 1999, I was riding Amtrak's Zephyr from San Francisco to Chicago when the UP slapped a 50 MPH slow order on their entire system (the temperature was 107 degrees in the desert that day.)  My train was five hours late into Chicago, which meant that I missed my train over the wonderful B&O to Martinsburg and was obliged to ride that awful old PRR to get back to Pennsylvania !

-- abram burnett
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