Office of the General Manager
100 Railroad Avenue
Monetesano, Washington
CIRCULAR NUMBER: 8.3 DATE: January 1, 1955
BY AUTHORITY OF:
S.B.Clinard
President and General Manager ___________________________________________________________________________________
Ballasting.-lt is the practice of most
railways to raise or lift a ballasted track from 2 to 4 in. or more
every few years. There are several reasons why this is done. (a) The
work of general surfacing is done most easily by lifting the track and
putting in a certain amount of new ballast. (b) There is also a certain
settlement of the track resulting from disintegration and packing of
the ballast and a loss of ballast over the shoulders and by being worked
into the roadbed. (c) Old ballast becomes dirty and drains poorly. The
common way, though not necessarily the best way, to improve the drainage
is to lift the track and put a layer of fresh ballast over the old. (d)
A further reason is that the weight of equipmer.t and amount of traffic
has gradually increased on most roads and from time to time it has been
necessary to increase the depth of ballast under the tie.
Before the
new ballast is distributed, all unsuitable material above the bottom of
the ties should be removed to the full width of ballast and used to
widen narrow embankments; defective ties should be replaced, all ties
respaced, and the track brought to perfect line by track-center stakes
set by the engineer or by track-center monuments. Ties can be respaced
more rapidly if chalk marks are previously placed on the base of the
rail where the center or edge of each tie should come.
The amount of
ballast required must be carefully determined by the roadmaster. A
greater lift than necessary is a waste of money. When the ballast is
distributed it must not Le mixed with old material. It must be unloaded
uniformly and in such a way that it will not be wasted down the sides of
the embankment. The ballt is unloaded either outside the rails or in
the center of the track, depending upon whether it is unloaded with a
plow or from side-dump or center-dump cars. While ballasting is
progressing the length of open track prepared fol' the work should be
reduced to a minimum and must be watched to avoid buckling.The bolts
should be loosened if necessary.
If only a light lift is to be made,
the work of reballasting can be done by the regular section forces, to
which a few extra men may be added, or two or three section-gangs may be
combined. Even for a heavy lift the size of gang required is less than
for laying rail. After the ballast is unloaded and leveled the work of
ballasting or reballasting consists of surfacing, smoothing up, and
trimming. General surfacing is usually understood to mean lifting the
track out of face to a uniform grade line. Smoothing up means the
tamping up of low joints and centers to the general level. If the lift
is over 4 in. th usual procedure is to bring the track to general
surface by shovel-tamping all ties. After the track has been sett.led a
few days by traffic it is gone over again and resurfaced or smoothed up,
using tamping-bars or tamping-picks. The ballast is hen trimmed to the
!'tandard ballast section, extra ballast is removed, and the work is
finished. If the lift is in stone or slag ballast and does not exceed 4
in. the first surfacing usually is unnecessary and the ties are tamped
with bars or picks. If the raise of the track is considerable, it is
often done in two parts, as, for instance, a tot.al raise of lU in.
might be done by making a raise of 7 in., and a final Taise of 3 in.
which is tamped carefully for final surface. It may be impossible to
continue the lift through tunnels and bridges and adjacent to platforms,
water-tanks, etc., because of limited clearance. At the end of the lift
a gradual runoff mu!3t be provided.
The usual gang contains from
25 to 40 men. For a raise of 3 in. with stone ballast and 4 or 5
tie-renewals per rail, a gang of 30 men would be organized as follows: 4
jacks with 2 men each, jackmen putting in jointties; 8 men renewing
ties back of jacks; 12 men tamping; 2 foremen. The organization of a
gang of 10 men and foreman, for a 6-in. raise and a. few tie-renewals
per rail, would be as follows: 4 jacks with 2 men each, jackmen putting
in ties in each half rail length; 2 men "catching up heads" or tamping
ends of ties; at end of day's run the gang goes back and 4 men spike the
ties and tamp inside the rail, and remainder of gang tamp outside the
rail.
Surfacing.-The work of surfacing is continual. All
parts of the track, and particularly the joints, must be watched
constantly for low spots, and when thei;ie develop the low ties must be
brought up to surface by tamping. After completing every kind of work on
the track, more or less surfacing is necessary. The work of surfacing
consists entirely of tamping, with the necessary manipulation of the
track. Low spots are brought to surface by raising the track with
track-jacks placed under the rail-base and outside the rail. The track
is lifted until the top of rail is at grade and ballast is then tamped
under the ties.
- The first work of the section-gang in the spring
after removing shims, is to go over the track and give the track a
general running surface. By this is meant the work done to bring the
track to an easy-riding surface by tamping up the low places, not much
attention being given to the general surface. General surfacing must
follow reballasting, laying rail, etc. One tie showing excessive
rail-cutting often is an indication of lightly tamped or low adjacent
tics.
In raising track both rails always should be raised
simultaneously, and by the same number of jacks under each rail, the
jacks being placed opposite. When surfacing is completed, the two rails
on tangents must be at the same elevation. This should be determined by
using a tracklevel. If at any time the difference in elevation of the
two rails exceeds 3/8 in. the track should be resurfaced at once.
One
type of work train, perhaps the most common type, was the ballast
train. On the Kingsville Divi-sion back in the early eighties, it was
usually an old GP20 and a few hopper cars. The ballast train would go on
duty at some siding somewhere where the work train was stashed. If it
was the first day of the work train, you might actually have to get your
engine out of the roundhouse track in a yard, go dig your ballast cars
out of the yard, and then run your train to where the ballast needed to
be dumped. You usually took only the number of hopper cars you
conceivably might need in a days work, but that was probably de-termined
by the maintenance-of-way foreman, and the train crew just dug out the
car numbers requested. Another option might be to dig out all the cars
you needed for a week's work, haul them to a house track somewhere, and
only take the number of cars out on the line that you needed that day.
At the end of the day, you would probably tie up in some house or team
track near there, which is where you would go on duty the next day of
work.
Once the ballast train was moved to where the ballast needed to
be dumped, the crew's job was pretty much over with until time to stash
the train somewhere. The MOW foreman would take over all the decision
making for the train movements and instruct the engi-neer by radio when
to ease ahead, back up, or stop.
Spreading ballast like this on the mainline was a slow time-consuming affair. The MOW crew would place a railroad tie under the car and in front of the trailing wheels of the car being unloaded. They would only unload one car at a time. They would then open the hopper under the car enough so the ballast would start flowing out, and the engineer would move the train ahead until instructed to stop. If too much bal-last came out, I would imagine they would have to shovel some out from under the car. The tie kept the ballast from getting under the wheels, and also smoothed it out to no higher than the top of the rail. Later, a tamping gang would come along and raise the track up a bit when they tamped the new ballast under the track. The reason you only took the number of cars you needed out onto the line was probably because a long string of cars has more slack, and the ballast might pile up higher underneath the cars be-fore the slack ran out, making it more difficult for the MOW crew to work the ballast.
a spot tamping gang, needing only a Tamper and a Regulator along with a crew truck and mechanic truck
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