Western Railroad Discussion > Recent tour of Abo Canyon

A few engineers from NMDOT were given a tour of the Abo Canyon project by BNSF project engineers and here are some pictures from the tour.

Status of the project is that the new roadbed has been basically completed. There is still some large excavation that must be done on the upper end but most of the civil work is complete. The bridges will begin to be constructed in January of 2010. At this point they do not expect to start laying the new track until 2011.

The alignment has seven locations where the old/existing track will become the new track. This will be done by cutting the old track and moving it and rewelding it to sections of new track.

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A few more pictures. The first picture shows the pioneer road that has been cut. This hillside will have to be excavated and cut back to make room for the new track. The existing track is just on the other side of the rocks on the left which is why this work is not being done as it will cause all traffic on the line to be stopped while the excavation is done.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/05/09 20:18 by theq3006.

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The next set

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Goodbye narrow, photogenic cuttings. Hello, Freeway-like construction!

Thanks for sharing these photographs. I understand construction has been slowed down a bit by BNSF due to the slack economy. . .

Fourth set.

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And the last set.

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A few other comments.

One interesting comment that one of the BNSF engineers made was that even with this double tracking the track would only have a capacity up to 140 trains per day. Above that number and it would affect the train speeds.

No crossovers were put into this new section of track because of the curvature. There will still be a 40 mph limit in the center of the canyon because of the tightness of the curves (2 four degree curves). The constraining factors were that the stream was on one side and a rock face on the other and the rock face had slid so that if any cutting of the rock were done there would be additional movement of the rock that would have to be dealt with.

At this location we could see drill marks along the rock face to cut back some of the overhanging rock. It was suggested by the BNSF engineers that this drilling had probably been done in 1907 when the line was originally constructed but in looking at the drill marks they looked fresh and had only recently been done but that was not the case.

And on the existing bridges, on the piers you can see extensions at the bottom. It was not known why these were done but the BNSF engineers speculated that these were done to protect against a 100 year storm event and there is no record of why these extensions were added to the piers. The engineers had had some calculations done to show where the 100 year storm event would be and as it turns out these extensions are right on the mark for a 100 year storm event.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/05/09 20:35 by theq3006.

It's been a good while since anybody could get into ABO, for photos. Thanks for posting.

It's easier to get pictures of North Korea's nuclear facilities than shots of Abo canyon!

Thanks for the pics, and for the explanations.

Did your BNSF hosts inquire why you were taking so many pics?

Thanks for these great pictures. It looks like they did a tremendous amount of blasting to get those deep cuts.

Wouldn't it be nice if during the "cutover" of tracks that Raton Pass got some use?

TexBob Wrote:
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> Did your BNSF hosts inquire why you were taking so
> many pics?

No, they had no problems with us taking pictures.

I do not see anything in these pictures that should scare off the mountain goats/mule deer/whatever any more than the old alignment did. Perhaps the NIMBYs will now find other projects to beat on.