|
A newly installed switch. This was
once a double track main line with a station siding here. The railroad
could have saved a lot of money by not tearing out the original in the
1960's. Well, maybe not. |
| Wooden ties for the
existing track. The blue box is also an essential piece of job site equipment |
|
|
Concrete ties for the new track off
of the switch |
| On a modern railroad
you will find underground wiring. Gone are those cool poles with the
green insulators that many of us collected as kids. |
|
|
Don't forget the hundreds of types
of tools and debris lying around the job site. |
| Here is
a use for some of that old brass track laying around in storage. It appears that the work crew simply cut the old trackwork into managable sections and tooses it onto the bank with a crane. From a hundred feet away it looked like discarded pieces of flextrack to me. Click the image for a larger version. About 240kB. |
|
|
This is the Ramsey Car Ttransfer Apparatus used
at Phoenicia in 1882. The mechanism cost $1400 and was easy to operate.
It did require some horses and possibly a winch or crane. Specially braced narrow gauge trucks were used to make the wide standard gauge cars more stable on the narrow gauge track of the Stony Clove line. For more information please see this John Ham / Robert Bucenec book. |
|
The pit was 20 inches deep and contained standard
gauge tracks entering from one end and narrow gauge tracks entering from
the opposite end. The center of the pit contained both. On each side of the pit was a set of 18" gauge rails carryiing a pair of trolleys onto which a long beam coulb be placed. The freight car was rolled over the beams (cross beams were inserted if needed) and the entire assembly was rolled over the pit where the trucks dropped off of their kingpins. A horse or winch pulled the trucks out and the car was moved toward the other end of the pit where a new set of trucks waited. As the car and trucks moved off of the pit, the new trucks were aligned to the king pins and the process was complete. |
| New Haven Railroad Middle Hadam Station 1928 |
|