One of my wife's patients happened to leave behind a copy of Progressive Railroading magazine, so she brought it home for me. I'm more into regressive railroading myself, of course, but it was interesting to look at. I was very happy to see an article by my old friend Wally Weart, a long-time IRM member who now lives in Denver. It's good to see he's doing well. Here's part of a picture from his article on how to maintain track and avoid heat kinks. The subject is long and complex, but we never seem to have problems like this with good old-fashioned stick rail, so maybe that's the price of progress.
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Believe it or not at one time (early to mid 80s) I was considered an expert on this topic. Of course at that time so little was known that it didn't take much to be an expert. Even went so far as to help Chessie produce a training video on how to minimize buckling potential when maintaining track. I did have a costarring role in the video. We made a generic version of the video available to the industry as a whole. This led to an interesting situation that whenever I was around a group of track folks one or two would always say that they knew me but they couldn't remember from where.I finally got to the point where I would ask them if they had seen the buckling video they would immediately break into a smile and say Yep that's where it was. Wish I had a copy of that video today.
PS We've always had a debate on whether Progressive Railroading is an oxymoron?
Dr. Track speaks!
Stick rail can have problems with shearing of bolts and joint bar breakage under tension due to contraction of the rail with cooling temperatures. At least, this can happen if the rail ends have already worked too far apart before it gets cold. On welded rail, the rail just breaks under tension.
At some museums, the joint bars are historic and the bar size is unobtainable.
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