The section crews are the men who lay new railroad tracks and keep the
old ones repaired. Railroaders call them gandy dancers, and the boss of
the crew is the king snipe.
In the old days, all the section work was done with hand tools. Men
lifted the heavy rails with tongs. They chipped out the notches in the
wooden ties for the rails to rest in. They hammered down the spikes that
held the rails. The crew rode to work on a handcar, pumping a lever up
and down to make the wheels turn.
Now there are motor cars instead of handcars, and wonderful machines
help with the work. A rail-laying crane lifts the rails and swings them
into place on the ties. An adzer with whirling knife-blades cuts the
notches. The spikes still have to be started into their holes by hand,
but then a mechanical hammer that runs by compressed air finishes the
pounding job.
[Illustration]
Perhaps you’ve noticed that there seem to be a lot of cinders along
railroad tracks. But they didn’t come from the engines. They were put
there on purpose. Railroads also use chipped stone or gravel or even
squashed-up oyster shells under the tracks and ties.
All of these things are called ballast, and they make a good firm bed
for the rails. When it rains or snows, the loose pebbly ballast lets the
water run off quickly, so that the ties will dry out and keep from
rotting.
Grass and weeds don’t grow very well in ballast, but when they do a
motor car with a chemical spray comes along and kills them off. When
lots of rubbish has collected, a cleaning machine goes to work. The
machine is called the Big Liz. It moves down the track, scooping up
ballast and sifting out all the dust and junk. Then it squirts the
cleaned ballast out again, leaving a clean roadbed behind.
[Illustration]
Section crews often have portable telephones or walkie-talkies that save
a lot of time. If they need materials, they call up the office and put
in the order right away. And if the job takes longer than they expected,
they phone a warning to the nearest station where trains can wait until
it’s safe to go ahead.
How does the section crew know when it is necessary to put in a new
rail? In the old days, they got orders from an inspector who walked or
rode slowly along in an inspection car, looking for cracks or breaks.
That’s still the way it is done in many places. But some railroads have
a machine-detective that finds cracks so small a man couldn’t even see
them.
The machine rides in a detector car, and it works by electricity with
tubes something like radio tubes. The men who run it simply look at wavy
lines drawn on paper by pens that are part of the machine. Whenever the
car passes over a cracked rail, the pens make a different kind of line.
And right away the section crew is asked to put a new rail in. Summer
and winter, the detector cars creep along, making sure that tracks are
safe.
In winter, of course, the tracks must be kept clear. If there’s just an
ordinary snowfall, a powerful locomotive can run through it with no
trouble. But when drifts get deep and heavy, the snow plow must go to
work.
[Illustration]
The man who first invented railroad snow plows got the idea from
watching a windmill. He saw how the windmill blades tossed snow around
as it fell. Why couldn’t blades at the front of an engine cut into
drifts and toss the snow off to one side? Of course they could.
Railroads began using powerful rotary plows. The whirling blades chewed
the drifts away. Even in lower country, there’s often plenty of work for
the snow eaters to do.
[Illustration: TIE ADZER]