ccltrainsWith the passing of steam locomotives and the use of natural gas in many electrical generating plants I think that the supply of cinders is rapidly drying up. We used to have a coal furnace and had a couple buckets of cinders for road/alley use when it snowed. Have not had cinders at home nice the early '50s. Now it is a bag of sand.
Yep, my folks had a coal fired steam boiler in the basement until the late fifties when Dad put in an oil burner. When the coal was chuted into the basement, mom hated the coal dust. In the winter, we had to haul the ashes out for a separate pick up by the village. Remember one time when someone forgot to close dampers and the fire got too hot and the pressure relief did its job. Dad at work, Mom was afraid to go down into the baseent and called the fire dept. Water was running off the walls. The "good old days" were not always good.
Having grown up near steel mills, I always associated cinders with 1/2 inch to 1 inch chunks of slag.
With the passing of steam locomotives and the use of natural gas in many electrical generating plants I think that the supply of cinders is rapidly drying up. We used to have a coal furnace and had a couple buckets of cinders for road/alley use when it snowed. Have not had cinders at home nice the early '50s. Now it is a bag of sand.
mudchicken The lace-up rule is all about ankle support. (lessons learned the hard way decades ago)
The lace-up rule is all about ankle support. (lessons learned the hard way decades ago)
A trackman's boots last about 3-4 months and get re-soled with Goodyear Vibram welts and toe caps at least twice before they have to be replaced with new uppers. The sharp ballast eventually cuts up the leather, especially working in loose ballast. (We're not kind to the steel toes either...we be switch kickers)
Mine usually last a couple years, but I also buy cheap ones. CN makes us use spikies in winter, and the screw-in ones are favoured. I'm not going to buy expensive Red Wings and then have to drill holes in the bottom.
They've been on a kick lately pulling people out of service for wearing rubber boots with steel toes (rig boots, Dunlops, etc), because we have a policy somewhere that says work boots must have laces.
Not gonna lie, I would probably wear lighter shoes in summer if we were allowed to. Steel toes won't stop wheels or couplers.......
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
Something I've been kinda curious about for some time: How long do the soles of shoes (or boots) of workers in yards last?
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"A stranger's just a friend you ain't met yet." --- Dave Gardner
The use of fines (screenings/waste) pretty muck ended when the orders came down ending mounting/dismounting moving equipment. Ballast anymore is there for drainage purposes only, and the smallest out there is chips (3/4" crushed hard rocks), then yard ballast 1-1/2" and then main track ballast 3-1/2" or less. Compound that with the obsession with automatic/GPS unit ballast trains and the doing away with loose car ballast supply. Mechanical forces never maintained the ballast hoppers or airdumps anyhow. They were not revenue cars. Now the other shoe has dropped where there is an extreme shortage of air-dumps and ballast hoppers to a lesser degree. The next time you see a corporate financial bubba or those that defer to the Wall Street Trash(fast buck artists), slap them around a little. Their bad judgement is the source of your griping.
In the meantime, quit running around in flip flops and tennis shoes.
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There are still a few sections of the Adirondack Division that have cinders. That will be somewhat alleviated when more ballast is dropped this spring, but I don't think they are going to dig the cinders out, so they'll still be a part of the roadbed.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
We still have parts of the yard where cinder deposits are visible.
They haven't bought finer walking ballast in about 20 years.
mudchickenYards and industrial tracks often were surfaced with cinders. (byproduct of dumping the ash at the end of the day when we still had steam engines) ... There are still massive windrows of cinders on the NE side of Pueblo Yard over this. Those cinders are massively abrasive and a major pain when they get fouled with mud.
Sure are a lot easier on the ol' body when walking/working there compared to the ballast that is the go-to answer anymore.
It's been fun. But it isn't much fun anymore. Signing off for now.
The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer, any other railroad, company, or person.t fun any
Those cinders are massively abrasive and a major pain when they get fouled with mud.
During my time in Pennsylvania - Winter snow treatments consited mostly of cinders and sand - one never got to see highways in 'pristine' white once the road crews made a pass - just ugly black. Totally in keeping with the dreariness of the Winter season.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Yards and industrial tracks often were surfaced with cinders. (byproduct of dumping the ash at the end of the day when we still had steam engines) ... There are still massive windrows of cinders on the NE side of Pueblo Yard over this.
mudchicken As long as we are straying off the OP: (1) Ballast degrades (Esp. steel mill slag and limestone, both turn to dust.)
As long as we are straying off the OP:
(1) Ballast degrades (Esp. steel mill slag and limestone, both turn to dust.)
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Highway bubba local consultant CE's - Just had another case of this in the last week on a project in Illinois. Really annoying when you see "safety upgrade" in the title block. Bled red all over that rascal.
mudchicken (6) Darts and daggers to the civil engineers designing vertical curves with road crossings in the middle of them. (They should be fired, lose their license and then be shot)
(6) Darts and daggers to the civil engineers designing vertical curves with road crossings in the middle of them. (They should be fired, lose their license and then be shot)
Would this be before or after they were sent to the Russian Front???
On a more serious note, are the CE's you are referring the RR's CE's or are they Highway Bubba CE's? I can see how a crossing would be excruciating to deal with on a vertical curve.
(2) Undercutters
(3) Ballast consolidation
(4) When they started replacing improved dirt with pavement (asphalt/concrete), they scraped-off the existing surface and re-graded. Rarely did they ever import roadbase or the dirt they removed.
(5) Rarely do counties or towns care about approach grades, especially where curved track has existed. No attempt made to match cross level / superelevation. (spilling over from the other thread, railroads are responsible for paving between the tracks and to two feet beyond the field side rails, the road agency is responsible for the rest)
I've witnessed highway department officials getting dressed-down by railroad commission engineers and inspectors. (it happens)
Not unlike the past situation in Chicago on the Union Station approaches at 18th Street. Double stacks could clear on one track but not the other.
I remember seeing a photo of the PRR that had added ballest over the years somewhere in Pennsylvania. The ballasted track was about 2 feet above the adjacent unballasted line.
CSSHEGEWISCHRemoving old pavement can only go so far.
I wasn't there when they did it, but I'm thinking they took out something over a foot. No streetcar tracks to worry about.
Removing old pavement can only go so far. I gets interesting when you get down to the layer where the streetcar rails are embedded. This isn't too uncommon in Chicago with underpasses beneath railroad embankments.
ccltrains I can think of one case where the track was elevated above any road...
There are many examples of this, and we've seen some of them reported here as the result of semi's being high centered on such crossings, and getting hit.
I would suspect at least part of the problem is that railroads tend to simply add more ballast over time, raising the track just that much each time. It's entirely possible that a given crossing of this sort was once at the same level as the adjacent, parallel road.
Since the road is usually the relative newcomer, I'm sure the railroads have generally adopted a "too bad, so sad" approach. Fixing the issue by lowering the track would likely be an expensive proposition.
You can see the same sort of thing at underpasses, where the highway gets repaved numerous times, cutting down the clearance each time. Any more, they've gotten smart and mill the old road surface before putting down new pavement.
I saw this in the village where I grew up.Eventually they recognized the problem and took out many layers of pavement, gaining quite a bit of clearance in the process.
Another problem is when a road is built next to the RR ROW. This could be 50+/- feet from the track. This presented problems when a road crossed rage RR. A vehicle could be trapped on the tracks due to traffic. This could be a disaster for a speeding train. I can think of one case where the track was elevated above any road crossings or the highway was reconstructed to be over or under the RR.
I have edited my reply above to further inform you of the difficulty for surveyors to locate ROW lines.
The establishment of taxable RR properties is now done by special State agencies, none of which are the same. This resulted after too many early and localized attempts resulting in litigation.
One of several plausible explanations .... Before the ICC Act of 1913*, the states & locals assessed the taxes and set the rates. (and abused the tax system to the point nothing was fair or made sense)
Another was mis-reading the law and its interpretation by GLO (now BLM)...no two individual state offices of the GLO did things completely the same way.
(*) ICC Valuation Act of 1913
mudchicken Other brain damage happens with federal grant right of way where railroads were allowed up to a maximum width and chose to claim something less (Missouri Pacific was weird about this, usually claiming only 100' of their 200' grant width per the federal grant of 3-3-1875). So far, nobody knows what the old MP thinking was - even old MP Engineering staff. The further east you go, the weirder things get.
Other brain damage happens with federal grant right of way where railroads were allowed up to a maximum width and chose to claim something less (Missouri Pacific was weird about this, usually claiming only 100' of their 200' grant width per the federal grant of 3-3-1875). So far, nobody knows what the old MP thinking was - even old MP Engineering staff. The further east you go, the weirder things get.
diningcar Another interesting aspect: The original main tracks were established with simple curves. Later as operating speed increased railroads introduced spirals at each end of the simple curve to minimize the transition from tangent track to the simple curve. This created the situation with the track not being situated equally distant between the property lines. This is especially observed with new construction (Williams-Crookton, AZ for example) where one degree curves had a 570 spiral that resulted in the track not being equidistant between the property lines by 2.35 feet within the simple curve.
Another interesting aspect: The original main tracks were established with simple curves. Later as operating speed increased railroads introduced spirals at each end of the simple curve to minimize the transition from tangent track to the simple curve. This created the situation with the track not being situated equally distant between the property lines. This is especially observed with new construction (Williams-Crookton, AZ for example) where one degree curves had a 570 spiral that resulted in the track not being equidistant between the property lines by 2.35 feet within the simple curve.
The BNSF Glasgow Subdivision between Minot, ND and Glasgow, MT has a large number of curves - many, many small hills and depressions that were just large enough to be worth bypassing in the push to reach Montana. From 2013 - 2015 we set to work double-tracking the ~150 miles or so from Minot to Sydney, MT in response to the Bakken oil frenzy. (The grading was finished almost the whole way. Track was only installed east of Williston, ND before the need disappeared.)
One thing that we encountered over and over again was the effects of a 20th century improvement program that reduced all mainline curves to 2 degrees or less. In a few places this resulted in thousands of feet of new alignment on new ROW, but most curves were just eased somewhat within the existing ROW.
In 2013 our maps showed the track centerline and the ROW boundaries. You could easily see that the ROW on the low side of the curve was much skimpier than on the high side, but there were no dimensions between track and boundary lines in the curves. It was rather difficult to identify where we needed new ROW for the new track.
We tried overlaying the maps with our plansets in CAD. That usually did not produce good results - the accuracy just wasn't there to make them match over even short distances. We tried referencing the deeds, and found that most of them said nothing more than "n feet on either side of the railroad as it is now located" - in other words, from the original track centerline, which was not shown on the maps. In the end, we relied a lot on fence lines.
In places where we had to acquire land, a land surveyor did eventually have to draw up a plat of the acquisition parcel. I have no idea what records they relied on, but fortunately the new boundaries were described in terms of metes and bounds from section corners - so the old boundary was used only for calculating the acreage (cost) and is no longer relevant in those particular places.
In at least one case, we didn't realize that the backslopes of our cut extended outside the ROW until construction actually reached that spot and the landowner objected. The short term solution was that the contractor signed a "borrow pit" agreement to remove the soil from the landowner's property.
Dan
Further elaboration may be helpful. Usually, the 100-200 foot ROW's were defined by the distance from the main track centerline. When the main tracks centerlines were altered by spirals and by other means it became difficult to properly identify property lines. I have been retired for many years and as a surveyor I would have difficulty defining today's ROW lines unless they were tied to established and legally recognized reference criteria.
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