Nostalgia & History > Tiny Treasures 110 Slides of MofW Dept

Here is another suite of scanned images from the Kodak 110 slides. These are to represent ordinary Maintenance of Way work in the 1970s. In a week or two I'll get some other adventures, but this is what went on between washouts, derailments, and major construction projects (in other words, most days).

First is gas welding to build up rail ends in bolted joints. Under the pounding of wheels the rail ends would be beaten down, it was possible (but quite labor-intensive) to add metal by welding then grind the surface off smooth. Before Continuous Welded Rail there were large gangs that moved down the track welding and grinding on a production basis. By the time this picture was taken in 1973 the task was only used to correct isolated joints that were bad. In another few years the practice was mostly dropped and any joints so bad as to need this work were eliminated by field welding. To this day a similar process uses electric arc welding to restore metal to frogs. (I never even tried to photograph that work!)

Second is a tamper on a "setoff". For many years the practice was to build temporary cribs of ties and mount set off rails on them, oriented 90 degrees to the track. Roadway machines were equipped with small travel wheels that matched the gauge of these lateral set-off rails. When it was time to remove the machine from the track it was moved to the set-off location and (usually) raised up on a hydraulic cylinder, the removable set-off rails slid on top of the running rails, it was lowered so the lateral wheels rested on the set-off rails, then it moved laterally to a place of rest on the set-off, and lastly the temporary rails were manually moved clear of the track. The tamper you see here is now clear for the passage of trains. Some smaller machines used the hydraulic cylinder as a turntable and the whole machine spun 90 degrees and lowered onto the set-off rails using the main travel wheels. Set-offs avoided the time to run to sidings or spur tracks and the need to take those tracks out of service. As gangs worked down the line the set-offs had to be moved every few days. There was a lot of heavy manual labor building set-offs and handling the set-off rails, and not a few strained backs and mashed fingers (as I recall....no statistics at this late date). This practice passed out of favor in the 1980s and 90s.

Last is one of my favorite photos, it is very typical of the hard work of a work train as an employee walks along a ballast car to adjust the flow of rock. This could be hazardous work when the ballast spread came to bridges, road crossings, or other obstructions to a level walkway. The introduction of remotely operated power ballast doors not only reduced the waste of rock from inefficient unloading, it speeded up the process and reduced the exposure to injuries. Dust? You bet, making it hard to see and breathe.

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How long would you estimate that rail ends on heavily used mains would last before they would need to be built up again?

Here are three small tie gang machines.

First is the tie handler with its usual push car so it can distribute ties along the work area. A good tie handler operator is an artist with the control levers, efficient in his work, and careful of the employees nearby. New 7" x 9" x 9' creosoted ties weigh up to about 225 lbs so you really, really want to move them with this machine instead of by hand labor.

Second is a very small tie pusher. After the spikes are pulled from the old tie, it clamps to the rail and stabs a steel fork down into the tie and pushes it out to the side. After it is pushed as far as the cylinder's stroke the tie handler will remove it the rest of the way and get it out of the way. The tie handler will then place a new tie close to the place vacated by the old one. The wheels are to permit employees to remove it from the track in a crude "wheelbarrow" mode instead of using a set-off and set-off rails. (It was about a four-man job to wrestle it off or on the tracks and those four men had better be husky and agile!)

Last is a "Scarifier-Inserter". It performs two tasks, first it digs down the ballast where the new tie will be installed (because the new ties are usually deeper than the ones removed, which have often been crushed down a little bit). This one is a "chicken scratcher" that has teeth that scratch back and forth to dig the ballast. Other styles used a rotary digging head. The second task is to force the new tie under the rails. This was done by having a laborer pull a hook and cable out of the side of the machine and snag the far end of the tie, then the operator wound the cable back onto a winch drum, pulling the tie towards the track. The laborer used a handle on the tie hook to steer the tie into the hole in the ballast, hopefully at right angles to the rails and centered in the track. In the photo he is just taking up slack on the cable, ready to pull the new tie in.

After these machines you would find rail lifters to raise the rail about an inch so that laborers could install tie plates, spike drivers (of many types), laborers to re-install the rail anchors, a ballast regulator to pull up the ballast and fill the tie cribs, and a tamper to smooth the track and tamp the ballast firmly (as it had been disturbed by the scarifier). There have been a lot of pictures on TO of tampers and regulators so I'm skipping them.

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Now let's call a work train! Work trains required a lot of supervisory attention, they did not achieve any useful work unless all the details were attended to. A MofW officer who wanted a work train had to double check the power assignments, crew calls, dispatcher instructions, switch lists, and gangs that were to meet the train at the work site. All the work trains I came into contact with had a sentance in the crew call "Crews must bring their own food as no eating facilities will be available." However is was usually a good idea to buy the crew some snacks or a meal if a store or beanery was available....good for morale. A motivated train crew and dispatcher were essential to getting anything done...(why do I use past tense, has anything changed?)

First is a classic assignment for a Jordan Spreader. We are looking at the back side of the wing as the locomotive pulls it away from us, clearing the side ditch of weeds and silt so that the roadbed will drain freely. This is on the Shiner Branch, south of Flatonia, Texas, and the rainfall here is at least 36" per year so drainage is really important. In some cases the spreader wing would roll the muck up the side of a smaller cut, in other cases, like this, the wing would be loaded up with a "plug" of muck and then move it to the end of the cut (and repeat the process until the whole cut was cleared.) It takes a lot of care and experience to handle a spreader; that wing can do a lot of damage if the operator loses situational awareness, and careless operation can damage the spreader or even derail it. Spreaders were originally set up to use compressed air from the locomotive's main reservoir. Most were later fitted with diesel air compressors, and the best ones were converted from air to hydraulic. Spreaders used regularly in snow service have locomotive control stands and the engineer can sit beside the machine operator of the spreader to achieve well-coordinated train handling.

The second picture is an Alco (I am sure many TO readers can fill us in on the model number) pulling a Mannix Plow out in West Texas in 1973.

The third photo is a side view of the plow. I understand that this machine was developed on the Great Northern. It is used as a sled or plow that slides under the ties, exposing them and smoothing off the ballast bed. It is very useful to change out all the old ballast, to change out a lot of ties, and as in this case, to change the spacing of the ties. On the SP the eastern lines (Texas and Louisiana) had a tie spacing of about 23" whereas the western lines ( and most other serious railroads) had ties spaced at 19-1/2". The goal of this job is to get the Texas track into the standard configuration. To do this you need to first get rid of the rotten ties, then respace the remaining ties, add new ties, and smooth the ballast bed so the "footprints" or cribs of the old pattern is erased. We are also getting rid of old, fine ballast and replacing it with crushed copper slag, a very heavy, dense ballast. The Mannix plow faciltates all of these tasks. In some uses, the Mannix Plow can be set to dig down into the ballast so the track is actually lowered, which becomes important where overhead clearance is a problem or where the track has been raised too high and it is perched on a narrow pile of ballast.

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Fantastic series! Completely photojournalistic... great stuff!

RTB, keep up these excellent series!!! MofW work, while frustrating for operating crews at times, is a part of railroading that is usually overlooked by most people. Even though I've been in the operating department for 37+ years, I am very much enjoying seeing the MofW side of things and appreciate your posting these photos, with more to come hopefully.

Great stuff!

Notch16 Wrote:
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> Fantastic series! Completely photojournalistic...
> great stuff!


Awesome!! More please. =)

Cheers,
Harry

Keep 'em coming...and PLEASE...some early tampers!

Excellent!