Day 4 - Trackwork

Ballast, the rocks that you find around railroad tracks, serves at least four purposes:

1. It's good for water drainage
2. It protects rail from ground frost
3. It helps to stabilize the ties, preventing them from moving around too much
4. It helps distribute the weight of the passing train over a larger area of ground

And fine adjustments to the trackwork can be made by manipulating the ballast. This, despite the advantages, still means quite a bit of work. That's what I spent yesterday doing: working on a section of track with a group of other volunteers and staff.

Using a laser level, Ed had surveyed one 180 foot section from Flush Flat into Wet Neck, and we got to work making the gradient of the track nice and consistent all the way through the curve. The rail does descend through that whole area, but we want a smooth decline, not full of lumps and bumps. The way we get the track raised is as follows: One person jams a long, heavy, solid steel pole under one rail, lifting it a fraction of an inch. Another person checks with the laser level to see if the rail has been lifted the right height. Several other people with long, heavy, solid steel poles then pound away on the ballast next to the surrounding ties, attempting to tamp it into place and lock the rail into the right height. Then you have to check the cross-level, which is the height of one track relative to the other. So it's lots of pounding to get the ballast packed in around the ties.

I'm feeling a little sore today.

By the way, the two areas of the route that I mentioned have strange names, but there's a reason for them both. Flush Flat is named for a toilet. Before it was a railroad, the southern end of Tilden Park was an actual army camp, and the cement foundations of the old latrine are just north of the track at this curve. Wet Neck is where the track heads back into the redwoods (as you can see in the photo). In the early morning, the blast from the smoke stack knocks the dew off the branches, and it rains on the engineer's neck.