"Out, but with a W - has found the answer" (belg)
05/27/2018 at 14:59 • Filed to: None
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"Out, but with a W - has found the answer" (belg)
05/27/2018 at 14:59 • Filed to: None | 6
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Urambo Tauro
> Out, but with a W - has found the answer
05/27/2018 at 20:48 |
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Skookum choochooer.
gmporschenut also a fan of hondas
> Out, but with a W - has found the answer
05/28/2018 at 21:45 |
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How often do the sleepers have to be reset? Or is there a lot of variation due to track use?
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Out, but with a W - has found the answer
> gmporschenut also a fan of hondas
05/29/2018 at 14:13 |
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Not sure what you mean with “resetting the sleepers”, so here’s the long(ish) answer:
The major maintenance work is tamping, using the machine in the third picture. It lifts the rail (and thus the sleepers attached to it) and shifts it left or right to restore the correct geometry. It then compacts the ballast underneath the sleepers using vibrating hammers (tamping tines) to stabilize the track.
The two big renewal works are sleepers and ballast, both seen in this video (which contains our machines, to my surprise):
The first one is the sleeper replacement: we’re replacing almost all our wooden sleepers by concrete ones, as they’ve got a longer service life and retain track geometry better. During preparation, the sleeper fixations are released, so the machine can pick up the old sleepers and put the new ones in.
The second half of the video is ballast “cleaning”: ballast stones get smaller and smaller during their lifetime and the ballast bed gets polluted with mud and trash, so the machine filters the correct size stones and puts them back in the track, while extracting everything else.
After the renewal machines, a ballast profiling machine, a tamping machine (as used in maintenance) and a ballast train pass one or multiple times to put the track back in perfect shape.
Concerning frequency: maintenance and renewal is generally condition based. The condition is measured using special measurement trains, ground probes, ground penetrating radar, ...
Deterioration depends on a lot of things, but track use, type of traffic (freight vs. passengers) and quality of the soil are the main factors. The line speed defines the allowable geometry tolerances. This means that a line with heavy freight traffic and a 40 kph line speed might need less maintenance than a 300 kph line with just a couple of passenger trains per day.
To put a number on it: plain line tamping is done once every two to five years, sleeper renewal every 10-40 years and ballast renewal every 20-60 years.