Western Railroad Discussion > Last Rail GAP on NWP in first phase of SMART commuter done.

The mysterious gap in the first 42 mile segment from Santa Rosa to San Rafael was buttomed up yesterday afternoon. Construction crews wasted no time today with a ballast train and track geometry car near Civic Center Crossing and Station.  First image shows a contractors ballast train starting to drag almost 400 tons up the 1.8% grade to the Puerto Suello Hill tunnel. The "engineer" tried to move forward but ended up spinning the wheels on the under powered track-mobile. He took slack and back up bu tstill couldn't geet the short consist moving.  Farther up the line a few hundred feet on a 12 degree curve, a track geometry car and liner begins its work in leveling the track.  Test and Photos by Mike Pechner

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Thx for the updates

Mike the machine lining the track is not a geometry vehicle or machine by a Harsco Mark IV tamper with track lining ability
when lifting and lining track out of face like this new track they can get around 4000 feet a day

Cool stuff right behind my work place!

Posted from iPhone

Thanks to CCTGM for the claification!

Asking the obvious questions:

I wonder if he ended up dumping ballast to be able to move after this? 
Was told that he should have been pushing the loaded ballast cars with the
trackmobile with its traction control and sanders?

A better question is whether he connected the air brake line to the trackmobile
air brakes assuming the ballast cars still had their air lines connected. 

The pictures were perfect, my thoughts anyway.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/29/15 21:15 by leonz.

For Dr. Demento fans, mention of San Rafael brings back memories of Shel Silverstein's "Smokeoff": "Now in the laid back California town of sunny San Rafael...." the crews are building train tracks, the first in quite a spell.