Railroaders' Nostalgia > Tuesday Track & Time Plum Creek and Temporary Adios

Here is an out of time sequence RR engineering story that I happen to have good pictures of. It is from May, 1984, when I was Regional Engineer for the SP at San Antonio. My slide scanning has been overtaken by these weekly posts and it is not likely to get better for a while due to travels. So I offer this as a temporary closure to this series, planning to resume once I get the rest of the images of the 1977-80 Los Angeles Division SP assignment scanned, captioned, and edited. There is some fine eye candy and some engineering and management stories to tell, but I’m just not ready here in April, 2014.

Plum Creek, at Milepost 150.27 (measured west from Houston) on the main line near Luling is a typical central Texas stream with a wide floodplain and a narrow channel. Good design here is to leave the main channel open with long spans so that drift (logs, brush, houses, dead cattle, Volkswagens, mobile homes) carried by a flood can pass through and use lower cost bridges for the slower moving backed-up water in the flood plain. The old 125-foot steel truss bridge over the center channel was due for replacement and a design of two spans of 62.5’ prestressed concrete beams was selected.

Compared to other bridge replacements this was easy: there was good highway access from Highway 90, the work could be done on a building pad in the channel with minimum obstruction to train traffic, and we had fine weather.

All these images except the first one were on the same day, May 25, 1984, but like all these jobs the weeks and months of preparation work is what makes it all happen. This is a day or two after the World’s Fair Daylight, pulled by the 4449, ran east through here, fans who were not looking at the motive power would have seen everything staged.

Image 1 is the truss bridge ready for roll-out.

Image 2 is a detail of how it was done: two lines of emergency track panels are laid at right angles to the bridge, dollies of solid-blocked 100-ton trucks are built up under each end, and when the time to move comes, the rails are cut and jacks on the dollies lift the bridge up so tractors can pull it to the side.

Image 3 shows the bridge moved aside. In the right foreground is the new center pier, cast under the old truss span.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/21/14 21:35 by railstiesballast.

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Thank you for all the effort to prep and scan all of your photos
and your written narrations!

Very informative and educational!

I look forward to more in the future!

Mike



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/22/14 00:37 by 2720.

Image 4 shows a crane swinging the first girder into position while side-boom cats bring up more girders.

Image 5 Survey Party Chief (an ancient and honorable job title) Jesse Villema having a bit of fun hamming it up for the boss and his camera. Jesse had a consistently calm, cheerful disposition, he was fun to have on the job.

Image 6 is the first train, an HOLAT behind a set of 7600 GP-40s and a slug. In the distance you can see the track panels stacked up to go back to San Antonio.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/21/14 21:38 by railstiesballast.

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How long did it take for the change out and trains to resume?

Looks like what was done to change out the bridge on Cibolo Creek in the town of the same name. Roll the old structure out, knock it over and put in the prestressed girders. I worked at Randolph AFB at that time, and the change out was something to see. I always wondered what happened to that 18xx builders plate.

Time?
I don't have records but it was all within the hours of daylight, as was done with almost all these bridge change-outs on a single-track line.
That it works so consistently well is testimony to the depth of experience and discipline of the traditional RR engineering and operating departments.

My firm guess is this was done on a low priority day for the expedited freights, with the local freight dedicated to dumping our ballast, and with calls for trains held back at San Antonio, Houston, and Hearne; we would give the Chief Dispatcher a call about 2-3 hours before we thought we would be open so they could start calling trains. IIRC by this time the Blue Streak was running via Topeka on the "Cotton Rock".

Some of the folks who show up in the whole suite of images were: Lamar Hoehne, Asst. Div. Engr-Track, Otto Baack, Roadmaster, Alton Stead, B&B Supervisor, Norris Carnes, Asst. B&B Supervisor, Harold Lapp, Automotive and Work Equipment Supervisor, and John Robertson, Asst A&WE Supvr. The work equipment guys were there to support the tamper and "just in case" anything went wrong with any equipment, even the contractor's cranes. Thank you one and all!

wow. are you working on a book for this stuff? would be good.