Handlaying Track

[John]

[eric220]

Dang. And we thought balasting was tedious in scale.

[C855B]

Dang. And we thought balasting was tedious in scale.

My reaction exactly.

Amazed to see the CPL in the background. CSX went through here like a tornado three or four years ago replacing everything with two Vader heads on a box facing each direction - UG-lee. They did this on one nearby line, and then embargoed the 150-mile line six months later.

[peteski]

WOW!
I couldn't stop watching it - I was mesmerized!

Couple of things puzzled me.  One was that the let the through trains go over the track which was not tamped by the tamper.  The other one was that while the video showed several trains going through, at the end the train shown was captioned as the first one going over the new track. Unless it was just a normal speed version of the earlier part of the video showing the first train which went through (in the time-lapse part of the video).

[Philip H]

I wouldn’t worry about the untamed ballast. The amount of running around the bulldozer did to level the ballast between tracks - combined with the short panel track segments being used - probably makes it relatively stable in the short term.

[CRL]

Where’s the tanker with the diluted glue mix to fix the ballast in place? 😉

[GaryHinshaw]

I wouldn’t worry about the untamed ballast.

I would! 

[nkalanaga]

"Where’s the tanker with the diluted glue mix to fix the ballast in place?"

I know you're joking, but the WP did try gluing their ballast down, I think in the late 70s or 80s.  There was one mention in one of the railroad magazines, and I never heard anything more.  It might work, but I'd hate to be the crew replacing the ties in a few years.

[C855B]

I know you're joking, but the WP did try gluing their ballast down, I think in the late 70s or 80s. ...

UP ate the Wobbly in '83. Anyway, WP was experimenting with track technologies in the early- to mid-'70s. On a railfanning trip, a buddy and I encountered a section of test track outside of Tracy (IIRC) where the main had several different track and tie treatments, with a conventional siding for runaround when needed. We didn't (know to) look for glued ballast, but I'll betcha if they were fooling around with something like this, it had to be there.