Western Railroad Discussion > Sperry Rail Services HyRail

Saw this vehicle today on westbound CA 24 between Lafayette and Orinda. I have never seen anything like this. Note the sensor wheels mid-body. I am impressed!

What does this guy do? Does this vehicle make the SRS railcars obsolete?

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The SRS railcars perform multiple types of testing. This truck looks like it can only do a limited number of tests.

Quite a few companies have Hy-Rail cars that perform ultrasonic rail flaw inspection.
The old railroad car self-propelled Sperry cars were camp cars when not inspecting track, it got the job done but had to be backed out of single ended branches, etc. and was quite inflexible compared to a Hy-Rail.
Now the crew just go to restaurants and motels.
What made Sperry unique was their magnetic induction test done along with the ultrasound.
Now ultrasound has a lot more capability and is by far the most common test.

The other big test rigs are track geometry cars. They have to be big and heavy to deflect the track under a typical load. Some of them also include rail flaw inspection although that is awkward to do.
A track inspection car can run a track speed.
A rail flaw inspection is done at a slower speed both to get a good "coupling" between the sensors and the rail an so they can stop to back up and confirm any probable flaw and mark it at the exact spot it is found. (Track crews have to be able to go to exactly the right spot and cut out exactly the right piece of rail.) A rail flaw is almost always completely invisible to the eye and an error of two feet would be a complete miss.
Track geometry, on the other hand, only needs to be within 20 feet or so, once the track crew is there they will find the deviation in the course of checking and fixing it with regular tools. This means a track geometry report by GPS or milepost plus footage is close enough and can be read on the fly or at the end of the run.

OK, class dismissed.

Those are just the training wheels.....

Yuk yuk.

Anyway, thanks for the rail detection 101 course. New to me!

It appears this is a standard-gauge hyrail, not a Bechtel-gauge BART job.

Does Sperry Rail Services have any competitors? Do the Class I's bid these jobs out?

Here are four firms that contract for rail flaw detection, there may be more:
Sperry
Herzog
ENSCO
Progress Rail Services

What happened to the old Sperry doodlebugs? All retired, scrapped? Any saved?

WOW! OK, I'm impressed. I worked for Sperry briefly in 1997. Brought three new trucks out of the shops at Danbury. Never worked on the "doodlebugs" although they were still around. Mostly working in the East on the NS, but I got to see several in the shops. Have not heard much from Sperry for a while, they used to test the railroad I dispatch but now Dabco Rail Services has almost all the work on BNSF in North Texas. We brought the first chase cars out of the shops. so its great to see Sperry still pushing the envelope doing it all from a longbed pickup instead of the 28,000 pound "bobtail" followed by a Chevy Suburban that I drove.

I'm guessing that advances in electronics and sensors make it possible to "do it all" from a smaller vehicle. Sounds like a lot, but not all.

From the above description, some of the assignments still require heavyweight (non-highway) railroad equipment. Otherwise, the march of technology is towards more flexible highway-capable vehicles.