About two weeks ago, I was called on a work train, to go up the Sidney Branch, to the north, and fix a hole. The Sidney Branch was leased out to a short line for several years, and as such fell into disrepair. The short line did what maintenance they needed to in order to keep trains moving, but nothing more. Consequently, as BNSF has tried to get the line running again since the lease expired, quite a bit of temporary fixes seem to have been made. There are a few places that look like they may have washed out at one point, and now there are odd bends in the track around those spots. The whole line is either 10mph or 25mph, because of the track condition. Besides that, lots of ties need to be replaced, and the whole thing should be tamped and surfaced.
The train I was called for was a small one. It was only about a dozen cars, and they were all loaded with rock of some sort. Some of the cars were air dump cars, with rocks the size of small automobiles in them, while others were ballast cars, loaded with the much smaller rock used to stabilize the track. There was an engine on either end. When I got to work, I made a few phone calls to try to figure out what we were doing, got my paperwork together, and then we found our train and got to work. She train had been out the day before too, so there were some empty cars to leave behind, and some loaded ones to replace them. We switched everything out so that we left town with all loaded cars, and then headed 18 miles up the Sidney line, almost two hours away.
After the slow ride to Intake, 18 miles north of Glendive, we got to the site where we were needed. Maintenance of Way was already there working. It was a spot where the track is really close to the river. There is a slight bend in the river, which causes it to eat away at the bank, threatening the tracks. On the other side of the tracks, there are a few springs, and the water that seeps out of them flows across, under, or around the tracks to get to the river, which also damages the railroad. The maintenance crew had been working to put in some culverts in that area over the last few weeks. They were all in place and draining the spring water properly, but it had left the tracks uneven and soft in spots. We were there to shore up the bank and eliminate the dips in the track. We ended up dumping only one car loaded with the large rocks. It seemed like more could have been put there, but that was all the Roadmaster wanted. The rest of the day was spent dumping the ballast. We would dump a car or two of ballast, and then move out of the way so they could tamp the track. This would pick the track up several inches, and then we would repeat the process. Someone was carefully monitoring how much the tracks were moving, and we did this five or six times until they determined that the dips were all gone and the tracks were smooth again. This process involved quite a lot of waiting, but it was raising the track. Once the dip was gone, we dumped some more rock onto the river bank to shore up the tracks some more. They had a machine there to move the rock around and get it just the way they wanted. Once we were all done dumping rock, we began the two hour trip back to Glendive.
A couple of weeks before that work train, I was called on a different one. It was warm, but the snow had not totally melted yet. On that train, we were going to pick up rail. Last fall, some rail had been replaced in several spots between Glendive and Blatchford, about 50 miles west of Glendive. At least a couple years earlier, rail had been replaced in Miles City, and the old rail was still on the right of way there too. The plan was to pick up as much as possible, although it would take several days to get it all picked up. There was probably about 12 miles of the stuff. The old rail gets picked up and either recycled or reconditioned and reused. Someone told me when they recycle the rail, it gets turned into razors, although I suppose the metal could be used for a number of different things.
We started our rail collection day with a movie actually. The tool car on the train was fitted with every type of tool and equipment imaginable. In the little office, they had a desk and a TV. We had the privilege of watching a BNSF safety video on the dangers of picking up welded rail. Let's just say the safety videos will probably not win any awards anytime soon! Fortunately, that did not take long, and we were able to get underway. The first few pieces of rail were right outside of the Glendive yard, within Yard Limits. We headed out there, and then the maintenance crew got the machinery all set up to start picking it up. Some rail was already in the machinery from the previous day, so they picked up the rail ends and got out a torch to cut holes in it. Then they got some joint bars and bolted the rail on the ground to the stuff already loaded on the train. Once it was securely bolted together, they fired up the power car and it was all threaded on to the flat cars with rail racks. There were about 30 flat cars, so they could get some fairly long pieces of rail on the train. If a piece was too short, they bolted another piece to it, until it filled up that slot on the train. If it was too long, they loaded as much as possible on one slot, then got out the torches, cut it, and began loading it on another slot. Some of the rail still had anchors, which had to be removed before the rail went through the threaders and onto the train. The engineer and I kept ourselves busy watching for anchors as the rail was dragged past the engine. If we spotted any, we would motion to a guy several cars back, who was armed with a sledge hammer. When he spotted the anchor, he would knock it off, and the rail would not need to be stopped to unjam a threader.
In areas where the rail was still frozen to the ground, the machine was unable to drag it across the ground. In those spots, the maintenance crew would have the engineer partially release the brakes, and they would drag the train instead. Once enough of the rail was off the ground, the machine could usually break it free of the frozen ground, and the train would stop. Once all the rail was picked up within Yard Limits, it was time to head west. The next stop was west of Colgate, about ten miles from town. There was about 2,000 feet of rail to pick up there. We could have kept going from there, but it was a Friday afternoon and the foreman was stubborn about quitting on time! So the rail collection continued on Monday, with a different crew. Once that train was filled with rail, it was left in Terry, to be picked up and taken somewhere to dispose of the rail. Another empty rail train appeared shortly after and all the rail was able to be picked up between Glendive and Forsyth eventually.
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