Western Railroad Discussion > Rail grinders

After a section of track has been ground by a rail grinder can the crew of trains going over the freshly ground rail tell any difference in the ride of the locomotive.
Obviously the rail would be shiny but can they feel any difference?

Rick

Not necessarily shiny, BNSF used to grind lateral "teeth" in the line between Trinidad and Alps
for added traction. Actually BNSF didn't do it, Loram did it for them, to be correct.

Out



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/15 13:14 by callum_out.

Usually no, most rail grinding is for rail head contouring that crews don't feel. For comparision, we can feel miss-matched rail joints, rail dips/sags, broken rail, and derailments...

You can hear when track has been ground from the locomotive cab. Grind leaves marks on the rail since it's a course grinding grit. That makes the wheels sing differly then smooth rail. At least the ground rail I have operated on has done that

Posted from Android

The rail was ground through our town several months ago (September or October). Back then you'd get the loud humming of a train using the tracks (any one of 'em; they ground all three). There are still spots on the line where you can get it, and the overall result is that the humming drowns out the sound of the flat spots on the wheels of passing trains.

The neat thing was how the pitch changes not only with the train speed, but inversely with the speed of the grinder itself when train speed is constant. It was easy to notice when the train you're on gets close to an interlocking, because the grinder would slow down, the corrugations would get closer, and the pitch would go up. And there's still a spot where the pitch of the train will change near a control point--for the first time I noticed this change in pitch as successive trucks rolled over the area. One would wonder what was going on if one didn't know about rail grinding!

Carl Shaver
Lombard, IL

If you're standing close to freshly ground rail when a train goes by, you can feel a bit of high frequency vibration propagating through the ground. This effect probably wouldn't be felt aboard the train given all the other rattles and vibrations that you feel normally.

-Stephen