Track leveling on a main line railroad. I have a friend who operates one of these for a living. He turned me on to this interesting video…
And noisy!! I caught one of those working the CSX mainline in Kentucky on my way to Bart’s.
Great close-ups! It’s funny; I do the exact opposite when re-ballasting. I will under cut the ties with a mini pointing trowel removing ballast from below and dropping the track back to a smooth packed roadbed.
The difference is the prototype doesn’t care if the track rises a few inches; traffic will soon pound it back down. In our miniature world migrating ballast tends to lift track and our trains aren’t heavy enough to push it back down.
Any thoughts as to what the device pushed out front of the machine is doing?? The black framed wheeled contrivance out front with the lights including an apparent strobe light???
Very interesting video.
Doc Tom
The device being pushed in front of the tamper is a laser level device. It signals back to the tamper to adjust the the ties to maintain level.
Joe Zullo said:
The device being pushed in front of the tamper is a laser level device. It signals back to the tamper to adjust the the ties to maintain level.
Nifty. I need one of those on my garden RR.
Tom:)
Those machines are really amazing. 2 guys doing the work today of how many it would take back in the day? I wonder how far they can go in a day?
When that video finished other ones like it popped up and I clicked on this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uCu12MZ5qbA
It is a “ballast washer” All I could make out is it has lots of moving parts and it makes alot of dust but what does it actually do?
Todd
I clicked the link to test it and there was the answer below. It picks up the ballast, removes the dirt, mud and small rocks from it which you can see being thrown from the side of the unit then it puts the cleaned ballast back down. Neat stuff.
My friend who runs a tamper for a living told me he can do 17 ties a minute. If I knew how far apart the ties were I could do the math I guess.
Using a guess that the ties are 8" and about 16" apart that’s just a bit under 1/2 mile/hour. With breaks & wait times they probably do 3-4 miles per day.
“Hmmph,” humpfhed the curmudgeonly old geezer, “I don’t have any ballast on my backyard railroad. All my track sits on concrete pavers or bricks. Best decision I ever made. Keeps weeds down too. The prototype guys haven’t a clue what they’re doing!” 
Forty plus years ago I spent a summer working on a track gang on the Canadian Pacific. In those days the track was lifted by big mechanical jacks and the ballast tamped in with steel bars that weighed about ten to fifteen pounds. Depending on the number of tampers the crew could sometimes do up to a half mile of track in a twelve hour day. Hard work, but were we ever in good shape by the end of the summer.
Imagine doing that at our age now Ron LOL
Probably wouldn’t make the first hour without going in to cardiac arrest.
this is how we “volunteers” do it on the WW&F railway Museum’s restored 2 foot gauge line
we used to have to run those jack hammer “tampers” manually…I could do about 2 hours before being DONE!
That was cool Eric.
Joe Zullo said:
That was cool Eric.
Yes - Thanks for posting :]