While catching up on shots of this weekends work on the WW&F in Maine, a qestion occured to me. You have a long abandoned roadbed. Over the years, trees bushes and the like have grown up in it. You want to relay the track. You cut the trees and bushes back. Before you plunk down the ties and rails, what do you do about the roots, frost heaves and all the things that have gone on over the past seventy years? Do you completely regrade or something less? How much site prep has to go on before track goes down?

Well, in the case of the WW&F we have 70 years worth of overgrowth to remove.

On any typical section of right of way, we spend a winter removing the trees. We're a couple of years ahead of the track as far as tree removal goes.

Usually, a year or two later, we bring in a contractor to grade the roadbed. He brings with him an excavator and perhaps a bulldozer. The excavator digs out the stumps from the roadbed and buries them somewhere along the right of way. They then basically scrape off the topsoil, and they may use it to fill in washout areas or areas that need a new culvert put in (we pull all old culverts and install new ones, unless the old one is in excellent shape).

Frost heaves we don't worry about, since we'll have to deal with them anyway once the track and stone go down.

To give you an example, because of the lack of road access we graded a half mile of roadbed about 2 (or 3?) years ago, from Alna Center north. This weekend's tracklaying is now going to reach the end of that graded area. This year thanks to a good neighbor we were able to get the backhoe across his fields and on the right of way, so we graded another half mile, to the end of our cutting.

While it's certainly less money than ground-up grading for a new railroad, it's not cheap.

James P.
WW&F