The most basic railroad maintenance task is changing a broken rail. It only takes 10 minutes if you are in the train yard where you can drive right up with a boom truck but if the broken rail is in an inconvenient location where you have to get permission and the rail won’t fit then the 10 minute job can turn into an all day job; with overtime.
Most broken rails are reported by track inspectors who will give the exact location down to the hundredth of a mile with details on the size and length of rail needed. The worst case was a broken rail reported by trainmen who are famous for getting the milepost wrong so it can take a while and sometimes footwork to find it. Once you know the size and length of rail needed, you then have to get a rail from the nearest stockpile and move it to the location which more often than not means hand loading the rail with rail tongs onto a hand car and manually push in to the worksite.
After you have all the material it’s time to get permission to remove a rail. On the main line you can simply call the dispatcher on the radio and he “gives time” and the trains will stop until you call back with the mandatory “In the clear”. On the branch lines there is no dispatcher and you have to put up flags according to the book of rules. There are no excuses when it comes to safety so we were required to put out three flags in each direction along with a “ torpedo” explosive device to get the engineers attention that there was a flag ahead. Even if there were no trains coming, we could get fired if we didn’t so we always put up one yellow flag, two miles away and then a red flag a quarter a mile from the broken rail and finally a green flag to tell the train they were past the break. Those three flags had to be duplicated for trains coming in the both directions. Putting up the flags could take an hour if the dirt was hard and you had to dig or collect a pile of rocks.
The trickiest part is making the new rail fit. All rails are supposed to be 39 feet long but in the field they rarely are. If it just a little too long you can bang the existing rail-ends on either side to gain up to an inch of slack. If the rail is too short you can actually make it grow an inch or two by using a hot rope. The hot rope is made of asbestos and soaked in diesel oil and when stretched out along the rail and lit on fire makes a smoky light show in addition to the rail stretching. Once the fire goes out, the hot rope can be coiled up again for indefinite reuse. I never did figure out how to make a cold rope.
If the rail is too long or too short by more than an inch or two then you have to cut in a short stub rail called a Dutchman. Cutting can be done with a torch, motorized hack-saw and even with a sledge hammer and rail chisel. Any time you have to saw you will have to drill holes for the bolts. The drill had a motorized version that would break down and we would end up using the two man hand powered drill. It would take 5 full minutes of turning that crank to get one hole drilled with both laborers insisting they were doing all the work. No matter how big the hole, the bolt still had to be bent to make it fit which leaves the threads striped and that one bolt can end up being quite a time consuming detour.
The boss expects every rail to be changed in 10 minutes or less and can never understand why it sometimes takes all day and overtime. In spite of all that, changing a rail is still one of the easiest chores on the list of maintenance duties, mostly because there is no digging with the pick and shovel. There is plenty of pick and shovel work when it comes to changing broken cross ties. That is the next chapter in the Railroad Series.
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