Ties don't rot overnight. Doing the math to calculate how many you have to replace in a given year to stay on an even keel for a given track class is not MBA level management/planning. Deferring, assuming that is what's happened, or worse yet simply not knowing, doesn't sound like good management.

Rot doesn't progress linearly and evenly. Replacing what is discovered to need replacement is about as good as any museum, tourist or shortline can be expected to do and works well for most of them.

That's true, if you have the money, but if you are say 95% of the way toward completing 1309 it doesn't make sense to spend what money you have left on a tie program. 1200 ties for the five or so years they have been working on 1309 seems like a reasonable number for the length of their line. I'm not sure what their lease says about who is responsible for replacing ties, but presumably the public entities have decided that it isn't a waste because it is their track and they will likely be leasing it to some entity regardless of what happens to WMSR.

I wasn't kidding.

Folks don't seem to remember just how bad things were in the pre-Staggers Rail Act and pre-Conrail time frame.

Brian

The Standing derailment wasn't a freaking joke it happened multiple times on the PC due to the fact that the ties literally rotten underneath the ties and spread the rails apart under the train.

It's not just in the Penn Central era that things like that happen. Over 10 years ago now, I was working a daylight yard job at CSX Curtis Bay yard in Baltimore as engineer. Our last move of the day, heading for an early quit, was to dig one repaired car out of the shop track and put it back in the yard to go out. Now, that track barely met the definition of a railroad track, so I went in there very slowly, no sudden moves. I carefully tied onto the cars in the track (the car we wanted was well over 10 cars back in the string), and slowly notched out, not even to a walk when my foreman yelled to me to stop, we were on the ground. The ties were so rotten, the track literally fell apart underneath the cars and spread out. So what does supervision do? Why they try and figure out a way to blame my foreman and myself for the derailment, of course. Spending a couple of hours "investigating" the mishap, and putting us into overtime. Minor yard derailments are not usually FRA reportable, unless they result in significant financial loss, injury, or death, so we really don't hear much about this kind of incident that commonly happens on a fairly regular basis on U. S. railroads.

Let us also remember--since we've derailed this topic into ties--that ties are not, and have never been, consistent products, not even in the days of concrete ties.

There is one railroad line I've had the opportunity to walk on in Arizona--in an area that gets both snow and triple-digit temps--where you can STILL find ties with date nails in them (the latest I've found was 1959 or so), ties with holes where the date nails were pulled, and relatively new ties that are already questionable. In an in-service track seeing several trains a day on average. (As I understand it, right now there's a tie gang and its equipment waiting to go over that line replacing ties, BUT the ties have been sitting in a yard elsewhere for a week or so now waiting to be forwarded to the line for dropping, for some strange reason.)

Even Amtrak, CSX, and MBTA got bitten in the posterior by a huge production run of concrete ties in the 1980s that were supposed to be good for 50 years and started spalling in eight or so.

https://casetext.com/case/in-re-lone-st ... sNav=false

And then even wooden ties today:

https://www.ttnews.com/articles/norfolk ... -defective

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/20 ... 814280001/

I just checked their website and believe it or not they are selling 1309 powered excursion tickets commencing August 1 through the end of November. Steam up the hill, diesel down.

Well we now know the answer to the question of have they learned their lesson.

Obviously not.

The real mystery is how they have any remaining credibility with the County and other funding agencies.

Sad but true. Ross Rowland

August 1? Or April 1! (The latter is more likely both figuratively and literally!).

But they’ve got brand new RDC commuter cars they are advertising as 1st class! (Brand new to them, they’ve been at TVRM for like 20 years ha).

I'm fully aware of how bad track conditions were pre-Conrail, and could be in places during Conrail and after. I've run over rails that hadn't had a tie underneath for so long we used to say (not even jokingly) the engines stayed on only through force of habit while the loose rails literally disappeared from sight into the mud, and shoved loaded ballast cars out onto track hanging in the air over washouts. But I've never read or even heard of a rule that said one could meet class minimums simply by removing bad ties without replacing them. The only way to get good track is to replace ties (and yes, all the other things). If there was some kind of Twilight Zone rule in an old 213 that said you could keep from injuring your finger in a meat slicer by having your fingers surgically removed before operating it, it might be interesting to know as a historical footnote and would have been worth noting previously. For as long as I've been involved in track, you don't get 'negative points' on your track inspection for bad ties, you only get a 'passing grade' if there are enough good ties in the right places (only speaking of ties). If you have a tie that's rotted to the point it won't hold a spike to hold gage, it's really just fouled ballast.

And as Bob Harbison pointed out, 213 is not the standard for a good, sustainable operation. I will add that anything that implies, in today's environment, that simply removing bad ties (or any similar Laurel and Hardy remedy, whether for track or boiler repair or whatever) as a valid way to meet standards is irresponsible and dangerous. You all may think I'm being overly sensitive, but there are waayyyy too many people on this public forum and even on the job who don't have the knowledge, experience or smarts to know the difference and could find themselves, their organization or their passengers in jeopardy by making assumptions based on unqualified statements. I could tell you horror stories about Class 1 MoW gangs that prove the point.

Back to WMSR - the revival of this thread based on the needed replacement of 1200 ties in 16 miles of track seems to be relative to my complaint. As others have said, that's not even close to one tie per rail, in the aggregate, so if the 1200 are just routine maintenance, I hardly see any reason for any alarm. If it's just one or two short sections that need attention, then they may have an imminent service problem, but the news article didn't really read like that. One tie per rail does not make the track unusable for 1309 on a weight basis. If a GP30 (65k lb axle load) can run on it, 1309 (61.2k lb) can. If the 1200 are just a symptom of bad condition of the RR overall, then they probably need a whole lot more than that, probably left off a zero on the needed figure, and that wouldn't be good, BUT...

If you read the news article, it says 1309 won't be ready by July 6. It doesn't give any reason that it can't/wouldn't be ready by August. There were doubters everywhere that UP wouldn't get 4014 out the door by May 9, and it was just two days before departure that it rolled out the door, yet 4014 made it to Ogden and back with only one very minor yard derailment and no major mechanical failure. It was the County Administrator who noted WMSR needed some track work and the $150k total included weed spraying and a bridge inspection. Given that ridership is down about 20%, presumed due to lack of steam/1309, I don't think it's unreasonable that WMSR asked the county (owner) and towns to help out with a contribution toward some MoW work at the moment. Just as important, WMSR is getting the requested help from the county, something a few other tourist operators could only wish for. Kudos to both the county and WMSR.

The one thing the article does indicate is that the 1309 trains will be pulled back to Cumberland by diesel, so we can take it that the needed improvements to the turntable approach in Frostburg won't be completed right away. If you want to complain about something other than a large steam restoration taking longer than anticipated and some missteps by a shoestring tourist operation, that would have have to be it.

Ok. If you look at the section of ties under a rail joint, you will see tie supported joints and suspended joints. The supported joint has a tie directly under the gap between the two rails. That tie has to be good. If you remove it you have a suspended joint, and if one of the two remaining ties is good, game on.

Yea the track is weaker, but it met class. Desperate measures for desperate times.

Brian

Just as a reminder, 4014 had the backing and money from Union Freaking' Pacific, with access to shops, tools, equipment, to do many of the things themselves, with more than enough money available to get the job done. They had a specific date/event goal and pushed hard to get it.

WMSR does NOT have the financial backing of a major class-one railroad, nor does it have the management of one. Nor does it have the shop crews, track crews, infrastructure, revenue, etc etc etc so forth and so on. We should never ever compare 4014's situation to 1309's. Apples and oranges. Moldy oranges.

Even with a virtually unlimited financial and resources bank account, UP barely made that deadline. Yes they made it.... but barely.

“Given that ridership is down about 20%, presumed due to lack of steam/1309”

Not possible. The experts around here say only a silly railfan like myself cares about steam. The general public are the only people who pay for a ticket and they are too stupid and uneducated to know the difference between a historically correct steam locomotive and a polka dot painted helicopter!

I figured I shouldn't have brought up 4014, but did it anyway, as a statement solely about the perpetual doubters and uninformed whiners on here that have nothing but pessimism. Yes UP spent a lot of time and money. WMSR has spent a lot of time and had some setbacks, not all of them their own doing. As a ratio of expense to resources, WMSR spent a vastly larger amount of money than UP did. And BOTH RRs sent out components for rehab and had a fair amount of work done by outsiders. UP's steam crew isn't really much larger than WMSR's, although they do use that money to follow a rigorous quality program. As for the deadline issue, UP had the golden spike to shoot for and the historical relevance and money to implement a big restoration project with a deadline, but once that decision was made, the rest was largely irrelevant. Granted WMSR isn't UP nor likely looking to do 1309 to better than new condition throughout like UP did 4014, but neither RR could or would have made that kind of decision and then just allowed the project to languish for 20 (or more) years. So apples and apples. Maybe an almost perfect fresh Golden Delicious vs a lightly bruised less popular variety that you got at the grocery after being in a storage fridge all winter.