Trog

He had probably been working more than seven days a week since the day he joined the railway. So his hobby was probably track work. His social life was probably discussing track with his friends. His friends were his work colleagues as they were the only people he ever met. Wife complains about him talking about track in his sleep, guess what he dreams about. (Probably one of those weird surreal dreams where the S&T staff get out of their van emerge blinking into the light and offer to help.) So what point retiring when work is your life, poor chap probably had nothing left to live for?

Also seemed to apply to PW Supervisors into the 1980's running up and down embankments at 64, dead by 66. The P Way also seem to suffer from dodgy knees, to the extent that the condition has acquired the name of ballast knee. Think how your legs feel after a day on a shingle beach then try it for nearly 50 years.

Dehydrated Steam Loco crews I wonder if they have a few vans full of them somewhere behind the strategic reserve steam engines in the Box Hill tunnels?

Just a thought but if you were to put a hydrogen powered train into service and were stupid enough to ask the British public to name it. Is it almost certain that the winning name would be Hindenburg?

I seem to remember a story about the S&D where freight train drivers would whistle a code, the fireman would drop off the loco and run down a sloping path to the lineside fence, where the local pub landlord or his wife would be waiting to hand over the ordered number of beer bottles and take the money. The fireman would then run up a second sloping path to regain the engine, carrying the shopping. It was not just train crew either I remember track relaying at Euston where we would meet up in the canteen behind the buffers, push a couple of tables together and spread out the layout drawings, using pint glasses as paperweights. Discussing how we were going to do the job while we waited for the possession to be granted.

Err Catfish have only a single door at the bottom of the hopper. 'Hinged' to one side which is why the stone drops out into the 4' slightly off centre depending on which way round the wagon is. So at least the bottom of the hopper is going to be slightly different.

Somewhat intrigued to hear a derailed train described as a fast moving situation.

My self I can not help feeling a bit sorry for the flyover at Bletchley. For more than fifty years people run it down and describe it as a white elephant. Then all of a sudden it is a vital piece of strategic infrastructure on the new East - West line. But no sooner has it had a chance to absorb this and start to feel good about its self, than the demolition contractors turn up and start knocking it down.

Before this there were different local standards, for the area I worked on White or orange hats were standard, Blue hats were Coss/EIC/Tech Staff, and Red hats were Crane Supervisors.

Which is why if you had a very small job where it was possible to merge the hoppers into another train it was always wise to have the hoppers next to the engine. You could also then uncouple the rest of the train and leave it out of harms way while you unloaded the stone. Should a hopper derail you would put a Duff jack (12 ton hand jack) under each axle box and jack it up into the air, you would then push the hopper off the jacks in the direction of the rails, and repeat until it landed back on them. Over time was the holy grail of the P-Way man, back in BR days (BR = Before Railtrack) we would work until the management sent us home. Should a job over run the day supervisor would ring the man he had relived and the Saturday Night shift would come back and do Sunday night as well. If you were of a grade where there were not many spares you just kept working, this happened enough that there was a standard box on the timesheet we used that you ticked to indicated to the Pay bills section that a shift was of over 24hrs duration and that they should not just take the start time from the finish.

The art with track relaying is to think ahead, you always want to have a couple of men preparing the next task, so the main force of your manpower on finishing one task can gulp down some tea and go straight onto the next. I was once involved in checking some small track relaying jobs that were being done by the track maintenance organisation, and they did not at least at first understand this. At the end of each task the whole job would stop for quarter of an hour while they sorted themselves out and restarted. This probably reduced the amount of work they could achieve by 50%. It also gives the appearance of chaos that has been remarked on, as in a well run job there are two or three different things being done in the same place and time. Put your foot on it first. Then the clip is trapped under your foot and does not go flying off down the job. Interestingly in the 1980s one of the selling points of Pandrol clips was the fact that they could be easily inserted and removed using a keying hammer. Then the health and safety (Persons of parental marital status -ve) turned up and we had to start mucking about with all sorts of special Pan pullers instead. Which as the hooks were often worn were more dangerous than using a hammer.

We are talking the relationship between volume and weight and wagon numbers and that is going to be reasonably constant for the whole BR period. The amount of spoil generated by reballasting is going to be a function of job length x depth of dig. To avoid moving the trains about too much you want your spoil train to be a multiple of just over the length of the job. The reasons for this are that moving a train at night takes quite a bit of time, in that you will have to wake up the train crew, who will be asleep in their chairs with their feet up on the desk. With all the heaters and the cooking ring full on to give the sauna like heat they prefer. You will then have to stand there and politely explain to them why you regretfully cannot let them move the loco down to the nearest access point just in case their reliefs turn up an hour early. While standing in a spreading puddle of rain water that is dripping out of your clothes. You then have to get back out into the rain and position yourself somewhere suitable to control the movement, and send someone back to bang on the side of the loco below the side window and request that one of the crew sticks his head out so he can see your signal. You then make the move and then can run round telling everyone that it is safe to start loading again. So if you are wise you set things up so you have to do this the least number of times. This is helped by having a train that is either as long as or twice as long as the job plus two or three wagons. As you can set your digging machines up so they each have an equal amount to dig, with as few places where one machine takes over from another as possible. This is important as different machine drivers work in different ways, and you can end up with a pile of ballast at the join and no empty wagon to put it in. Giving the machines equal amounts of work is also efficient as you are not waiting for the machine with the most work to finish, and the machine drivers can see that you are being fair with them. So you position the train load the front half, draw it forward by the length of the job and dig the lower half of the hole into the back half. The few extra wagons if needed are to tidy up the ends and any humps at points where two machines work joins. What you must avoid at all costs is ending up with a train of randomly loaded and unloaded wagons, as you will then end up with one machine working while the rest sit idle as the areas needing digging and the empty wagons will never coincide. You can then get rid of the spoil train, myself if the train crew had been particularly unhelpful, I might leave them sitting at the job site marker boards for quite a while before I had the free time to pass them over to the PIC to get them out of the possession. This needs doing so that you leave them enough of their shift to put the train away in it destination siding at the end of their shift, But no early finish or excuse to bail out and leave the train for somebody else to deal with. Although train crew that irritating were rare, and some particularly the older drivers could be very helpful. Enough wagons to stand the job once would do for a shallow skim dig and scarify, which was sometimes done in the sixties, when they were trying to install a lot of concrete sleepers and CWR, needless to say such a job would not last and you would soon be back to reballast properly. A single stand of reasonably high sided opens would also be enough for a drain, I liked to use Coalfish for that myself. Enough wagons to stand the job twice would suit a 12" reballast, and three times a formation dig, But by then you were probably talking more than one spoil train. The old ZKV iron ore tipplers were an ideal spoil wagon having a high capacity per unit length and were tall enough that the guard had no idea what you had put in them. Conversely sea urchins were a really useless wagon being long in length and low in capacity, they also had loads of ledges that all had to be cleaned off before the train could be despatched from site, in fact the ledges probably had more carrying capacity than the inside of the wagon body. For bottom stone you need 10 tons of ballast per rail length for every 3" of depth, a single stand of open wagons would usually do this for a 12" dig, although you would need more if using long low capacity wagons like the Sea Urchin. Usually you would unload about the right amount from a train standing the job, then have one machine working through with the laser dozer adding or removing stone, so his blade was kept about half full. Before laser control you would go through the job setting the height with a sprit level on a long lath, and the drivers would then smooth out the top surface by back blading. When putting in bottom stone it is always wise to make the top surface of the stone an inch low, as tampers seem to work a bit better when doing reasonable lifts, rather than small ones, and while lifting track is easy lowering it is not, The other thing to think of is where you are going to put your crane or TRM that is going to lift out the panels. This can be tricky as you need that vehicle before the first spoil wagon and after the last bottom stone wagon. Normally you would put it on the bottom stone train, bring the spoil trains over the site split the bottom stone train loco over the site wagons clear before the site and remove the track onto Salmon or possibly Sturgeon wagons standing split either side of the job on the road you are working on. You then reassemble the train and set it back clear so you can load and then dispatch the spoil trains. You then unload the bottom stone before again splitting the train to release the TRM to put the new track back in. Once the new track is in the now empty bottom stone train and TRM can leave, and once the new track has had a quick hand pack where needed the panel train can be rejoined and also despatched. Then it is just a matter of unloading the top stone from hoppers ploughing it, and bringing in the tamper. When working with a plough brake you will tend to find the more experienced staff wedged into the corners of the balcony. As during the unloading of hoppers it was usual for the drivers just to use the loco brake, and you could get a very rough ride at the back of thirty loose coupled wagons. It was also very important when unloading hoppers to ensure that there was no reason for the driver to stop the train unexpectedly. As once you open the doors on a Dog or Catfish, there was no way of shutting them until the wagon was empty. If you opened the doors on such a wagon and the driver stopped the stone would pour out and eventually lift the wagon off the rails, or at the very least completely bury the wheels. You would then not be able to continue until all the ballast under the wagon had been shovelled clear.

How are you going to load the spent ballast into the open wagons which are now off the end of the job and on the road you have taken the track out of and hence can not be moved nearer? Note that you will need enough opens to stand the job slightly more than twice to reballast, so if you have twelve panels on two sturgeons that would mean about 34 opens for spoil. You would then need a similar number of opens full of new bottom stone, and of hoppers for the boxing in and shoulder ballast. I would suggest marshalling the hoppers next to the loco as controlling them during unloading if they were at the back on an unfitted train of that length could be tricky.

While sturgeons could be used for track panels that was more normally a job for Salmon wagons. Although that might have varied from Division/Region to Division/Region or over time. A Sturgeon in my experience would more likely be used for rails or S&C components. Scrap S&C might be loaded in a sturgeon with sides (Later a Tench) because the sides made getting a safe load easier, with the old timbers going into open wagons. I also seem to remember that there were two types of Sturgeon, Sturgeon and Sturgeon A one of which had gauging restrictions, and was only used to carry imported timber from docks to Ditton? depot.

The ballast would be dropped into the four foot from hoppers, so the amount of ballast dropped is restricted to what the last hopper can run over anyway and having one more wheelset before the plough is of little importance. If the plough is under the wagon you might also be able to apply more of the brakes weight onto the plough which might help stop it lifting the brake off the rails.

Even the very best of models is second best to a photo of the real thing.

Small beer I remember a PW maintenance supervisor with dodgy feet, working on track in carpet slippers - would not get away with that these days either. I seem to remember that it was a Saturday night north of Northchurch tunnel, with thunder and lightning rattling round the hills, the signalman picking that time to mention that the tunnel was supposed to be haunted. For some reason the track gang had not turned up, and the two of us young and old had to finish digging out the start hole for a ballast cleaner on our own. Happy days/nights.

ST and Kinetra baseplated S&C was usually of the early inclined rail flat bottom rail designs. So probably more appropriate for general use in early BR period layouts. However they can still be found being used on layouts that have not been relayed since that time. Mostly in sidings and minor lines. Although you can always find exceptions for example there was a lead in the down slow at Litchfield on the TV line I think into the early 2000's which had BR1 type baseplates but branded LMS and the old type of 113lb FB rail. It must have been one of the earlier FB leads to be installed.

Often like that the P-Way. I once found a nice neat pile of seven hot shoes lying beside a length of new CWR with a somewhat bruised end. What did I do as a responsible manager? Two things first I rang the relayers and warned them that the rail needed moving. Then I picked up the hot shoes and threw them behind a conveniently situated bush. I was also involved with a saga regarding a bullhead joint and a non set of fishplates. one plate was a stepped 95lb plate and the other was a 95lb to 97 1/2lb straight junction plate. After several increasingly sarcastic emails from myself about the local maintainers attempts to correct the joint, they finally managed to get all four bolts in and at 90' to the long axis of the rails. Before I could get to the bottom of how they had managed this with a plate with a hole spacing 1/2" different to the rail and the other plate, the end of the rail fell off. I did a quite extensive search of about a quarter mile of line side but the whole rail had vanished, I wonder why.

A few more possibilities an early LMS FB baseplate and BR ST baseplates with ST and Kinetra clips.

The BR3 might be a suitable early FB plain line baseplate to model, as it has a jaw on one side of the rail and an up stand where the elastic spikes fit on the other.

Another possibility for a trap where there is limited space each side, is to fit a normal pair of trap blades, but fit a guard rail in the 4' so derailed vehicles are kept reasonably straight.

Just a thought but did the middle panels need less cross bracing for structural reasons than the end ones. Windows then being inserted there as it was the easiest place to put them if required. Rather than the lack of the second cross brace being because of the windows.

I thought that 45'-0" rails were more for use in secondary country lines where getting the required number of men together to handle 60'-0" rails was tricky. As even then the extra joints on mainlines would have been a maintenance liability. Also changing from 60'-0" jointed to CWR saves 10% of the energy needed to move a train, so changing from 45'-0" to 60'-0" rails would save about 2.5% of traction power which all adds up. The LNER also in the later period used a form of 110lb FB rail that had a wider foot than the LMS and later BR sections. Yes the S1J and later AS1J were larger based chairs used on a 12" wide sleeper either side of rail joints. The standard S1 type chairs came in at about the time of the grouping as I have seen LNWR examples. The L1 chairs were a square based type often used where rails came close together in S&C and on longitudinal timbers. The M1 was even smaller and often used in slip switches. There was also an S2/AS2 chair a smaller version of the S1/AS1 for use with 85lb BH rail on secondary lines. Conversely there were also 00T chairs with a larger square jaw used with 97 1/2lb rail particularly on the GWR, this was slightly larger all round than 95lb BH, and was often used in tunnels. If when out and about you see 00T chairs check the bolt spacing of the fishplates as 97 1/2lb rail has an even bolt spacing like FB rails.

I had two lift out sections across a doorway on my layout I used some two part bolt together plastic corner blocks without the bolt to ensure that the ends stayed in alignment. I also fed one rail electrically on either side of the bridge section across the bridge so that if the bridge was out there was automatically an unpowered section of track leading up to the abyss.