Maintenance-of-way trains and equipment CHRIS D’AMATO: WATERLOO, IN; APR. 17, 1983
It’s the start of spring and a Jordan spreader is being used to clear and re-shape a ditch along the Conrail right-of-way (above). Railroads use ballast cleaners (below) to remove the dirt and debris from ballast so that it drains properly and the rough stones stay locked together. The cleaner scoops up old ballast, screens out the worn pieces, dirt and fines, and then replaces the good ballast along with fresh ballast as needed. Speno ballast cleaner No. 5 and its accompanying train are shown working on the Chesapeake & Ohio.
side and reach low enough to re-shape the ditches along the right-of-way. Jor- dan spreaders typically have a front- mounted plow as well. These front plows vary in size and shape depend- ing on the service the machine was de- signed for. Some were only low plows designed to only remove excess ballast from the track center, others had large plows used for heavy snow removal. The side wings can be used to plow snow off an adjacent track, such as on a double-track mainline or siding, clearing both tracks on the same pass. Models of Jordan spreaders are
available in kit and r-t-r form in sever- al scales. Some models will have posi- tionable side wings; others will not. Ei- ther way, you could model a Jordan spreader in transit from one work loca- tion to another. Spreader work trains may consist of only the spreader, a loco- motive or two, and perhaps a caboose. Add some side-dumping ballast cars and your train’s task could be to add fill material to the roadbed next to an eroding river bank. Other trackside ditching or earth- moving may be accomplished by anoth- er approach. For years, many railroads have simply coupled side dump cars on either end of a work flat. On the flat- car, a crane would work with a clamshell bucket loading the dump cars with the unwanted earth.
The
crane may be mounted on a crawler chassis or on railroad wheels riding on rail mounted to the flatcar deck. The use of these small cranes on flat cars dates far enough back that the cranes were first steam powered. Some rail-
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roads even set a small Burro crane on a flatcar equipped with rails. In modern times, one prototype car builder offers a long articulated gondo- la railcar with a crawler-tracked exca- vator machine sitting on the railcar floor. This excavator starts at one end of the car loading dirt removed from the ditch and simply backs up as more floor space is needed for the ever-in- creasing pile inside the car. Once the train is loaded and moved to the un- loading site, the same machine simply shovels the dirt back out. Modeling
RAILROAD MAGAZINE COLLECTION: C&O RWY.; MILEPOST FM 460.8; CIRCA 1950
this special rail car would be a chal- lenge (due to the tight curves found on model railroads) but would make for an interesting car. Work trains unloading new or pick- ing up used crossties or other track material, such as spikes and tie plates, may use the same equipment as the above described ditching trains; just change the clamshell or ditching buck- ets for tie grapples or electromagnets. Another modern innovation is to place a specially-equipped backhoe on top of a gondola car for loading or un- loading ties or other track material. Modeling this operation would be a fair- ly easy modification to a scale model of a backhoe; add several cars of track ma- terial to the train. To emulate the actual operation of unloading track material, the work train would still require an engineer to run the train and a “maintenance ma- chine operator” to use over-sized tweez- ers to actually remove scale crossties from the cars and place them at track- side. This creates some diversity and a new position to fill during an operating session. Afterwards, other passing train crews will see what the work train has been doing and why it was out on the mainline.
While we are on the subject of un- loading track material, much of the rail now used on mainlines comes welded into
lengths of around 1,440 feet
(known as CWR, for continuous welded rail). Moving these long strings of rail is done with specially equipped flat cars having racks to layer and support the rails as they are suspended from car to car. As these trains enter into
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