Quote:
Originally Posted by Panther Al
I'm not a pro on railroads - my knowledge comes from modelling them - but I think these days Jointed is just a bad thing altogether. It was different back in the day (Up until, oh, the 50's perhaps) when the railroads could hire swarms of crew to make sure the lines was as in good a shape as you could possibly get from what I understand - I've seen period pics of double tracked mainlines where even the ballast was trimmed up in a neat perfectly straight line by crews as part of their job.
But speaking of ballast: this is what I think would doom most tracks without steady maintenance. Lack of traffic will help in keeping it together, sure, but weather is gonna do number on it - especially with washouts.
For example:
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Damn. At first I thought that was a serious mudhole, and I was going to say that track really needs to see an undercutter crew. Then I scrolled down a little bit.
Washouts are a real PITA, and I would imagine they would be one of the more difficult maintenance projects (aside from bridges) post-Apoc, since most of the machinery for dealing with them and getting the track back how it needs to be is going to be rusting in a siding somewhere. Yeah, ballast can be transported by wagon and dumped, spread, and tamped by hand, but damn that's going to suck. Guess that's what slav.....er, I mean, criminal and POW labor is for.
There are still crews that make the ballast neat, it's just usually reserved for main lines and sidings that see a lot of traffic, and it's not something that most maintenance personnel do since there are dedicated crews for it. Backtracks and industry tracks have a lower priority. There is a surfacing crew (who tamp the ballast between the ties and clean everything up) with the other maintenance crews, like the big tie gangs or rail gangs. The machines are kinda cool to watch when they're doing their thing, too. Just don't stand behind the ballast regulator when it's brooming the track. ANYWHERE behind one, I mean. They can throw rocks with a pretty good velocity a fair distance.
Jointed rail is OK I guess....it works for slower trains or on track with lower volume of traffic (from what I've seen....there's probably a formula somewhere that says whether jointed is OK for X tons of trains at Y speed or something). I just don't like it because it seems like the joints are generally where things go wrong, I'm pretty sure that trains have to run slower on it, and welded just looks neater.