Does anyone have experience with installing rails for heavy rail (not trolleys) in a new concrete floor?

I'm looking for an easy and cost effective way.

Thanks.

Jim:

If the floor is already poured without a flush height rail trough, there is no "easy or cost-effective way" to do it.

To install a third rail in Strasburg's Back Shop, we milled multiple, lengthwise grooves with a concrete saw set to the new rail height, and then chopped the stuff out with concrete chisels. (I assume you're not thinking of just setting the rails on the completed floor?)

For fastening, whatever your plans are, bolts set in epoxy followed with clips, are often the preferred fasteners.

Steve:

I'll be removing dirt and wooden rails, starting new.

Ideas?

If you're starting fresh with new track and a new floor there are a few methods we've used for the Navy.

If the volunteers are doing the track work, build it with concrete ties (or steel ties if your excavation depth is limited) and then tamp normally, except leave the cribs ony about half-filled with ballast. Then pour your concrete over the ties to fill in the cribs and anchor the whole structure in place. Strongly suggest you weld any rail joints in paved trackage. If you use some sort of rubber flangeway filler on both sides of the rail, then if you need to replace the rail at some point, you can (with great difficulty) remove the filler and access the rail clips.

The other method that requires more skill with concrete work is direct fixation. Several ways to do this, but most require you to install a base plate with anchor bolts dropped out of the bottom, that you flow your concrete under. This also requires you to form the channel that the rail will sit down into, or to pour your concrete in two lifts. The cross section of the concrete also needs to be properly engineered both for vertical support and lateral strength.

A 3rd method I've seen used is to very carefully prepare and level your subgrade, and then install the track using one of the precast tub crossing products, and then pouring concrete in the gaps between tracks.

Greg

Hmmm wooden rails? Wow that is really old track. :-)

please see private message

Actually, we have wooden "rails" in our motor car shed (at least I THINK we do; there is so much junk in there I haven't seen them in some time!) Actually, I think that a lot (a majority perhaps?) of motor car sheds just use wooden 2 x 4's or something similar, for "rails" within the shed. Maybe we should take a survey sometime.

Les Beckman (Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum/North Judson, Indiana)

Our shop was about as simple as you can get. New ties, rail tie plates etc. Laid, tamped with about a third of the tie top exposed. Poured the concrete over it . They then used 2x4 s with an angle ripped sloping from the top towards the rail for a flange way.
This has worked very well for 9 years now and we've had SD-60's on down on it. You can save the 2 x 4's to fill the flange way for playing baskettball like our 2nd and 3rd trick operators did as well. When we left a loco over the pit and oil and water got in there we didn't clean it out till the following morning when we would find the ball floating in the mess. after a while they got sick of it and quit. It does make for a smooth work floor when your doing other stuff on it.

How did you hold the 2x4's next to the rail when pouring?

Are you concerned about water getting into the ties and rotting them? Or, it that so long from now someone else can worry about it?

They pored the create then wiggled the 2 X 4's in before they finished the creat. The create held it in place rather well It looked really simple to do, no special tricks.
As far as life span, I had no say or input as to how it was done. I do know there is about 3 foot of very hard packed stone under the base of the track. They did build a very nice hard pan. The whole building is built above grade. If I remember correctly there is a geo-textile fabric under it as well.
I would like to belive the ties are good for at least 30 to 40 years. Else where in the mill we have dug up track that had been done in buildings in a simular manner that were at least 50 years old and you could reuse the ties. The wharehouse we just removed track in was built in 1951 and the ties looked great when we took them out.

FEBT built the track inside our restoration pad using scrap sections of rail as ties. Risers were welded onto the rail and the running rail and crane guide rails were welded atop the risers. Time will tell if welding it all together causes any issues.

With the rail structure together, 2" foam strips (cut from sheets intended for concrete forms) were taped to the inside of the the running rail and both sides of the crane rail and cut flush with the top of the rail. This allows the concrete to be smoothed by running a stud along the top of the rail. After the concrete has cured, the foam and the thin layer of concrete on top of it can be chipped out of the groove leaving a nicely formed flangeway.

Rail structure:



Foam on the rail.

The Port of Tacoma uses a similiar concept in their embedded track. There are a two main differences though.

1) The rail is laid upside down, with #62 rail clips welded to the base of the rail. This creates a sort of steel tie. The #62 clip is only welded to the "steel tie" formed out of rail, nothing is welded to the running rails.

2) The steel ties are completely embedded in the concrete. Supported on small dolby blocks (small pieces of cinderblock designed for supporting rebar etc., not some kind of 7.1 surround sound <g>) they are totally encased in concrete.

The system seems to work well, and has withstood some very heavy traffic, both from trains and from straddle carriers unloading containers.

BTW, as somebody who used to do concrete inspection for a living, I'd suggest finding somebody who is familiar with that sort of thing and getting some feedback from them. They may have some useful suggestions.

As an example, the Port's system of totally embedding the entire metal structure avoids the problem of rust and resulting concrete spalling. By having part of the metal exposed, you're likely to encourage rust, and as the metal expands it will break away the concrete.

Find a friendly civil engineer and have him give your plans the once over.

Interesting topic. I’ve done a bit of concrete work over the years (and more form work for concrete than I care to remember), and I have some comments.

Retain the services of an experienced cement finisher. There is more to finishing a concrete floor than just striking it off. The surface needs to be troweled to consolidate the cement into a hard smooth skin at the surface. The edges of the flangeways should be troweled with an edge tool, to give them a hard radiused edge that won’t continue to crumble. After the concrete is finished and set hard enough to walk on, spray it with setting agent / sealer. This has two purposes. It slows the rate of water evaporation, thereby keeping the water available for hydration (concrete cures by chemically combining with the water, NOT by water evaporation) and leaves the final surface somewhat waterproof, so it is less likely to absorb stains.

”Stepping in” wood flangeway fillers is an easy way to get flangeways with minimum work, BUT it takes experience to know how to set them. They will stay if the concrete is poured properly stiff, but often times concrete crews like to add water (the technical term is “pissing it up”) so it flows better and is easier to move. This decreases the ultimate strength of the concrete, and can make the flageway forms float, so the resulting flangeways are not as deep as intended.

Welding the base of the running rail is just asking for cracks to form in the rail. The Port of Tacoma method, with spring clips welded to the base of upturned rail used as ties is much better. It occurs to me that the same construction could be had by simply clamping the rail bases together with big C clamp like beam clamps from McMaster Carr; it only has to hold the gauge until everything is cast in concrete, so to speak.

I also see a problem with the method used by FEBT; the rail has no support. Should be good for the light loadings the EBT will be limited to, but under heavy load, the rail can break and punch right through the floor. If not using a full compliment of wood or concrete ties on a compacted grade under the floor, then a trench needs to be excavated under the running rail so the rail sits on concrete and transfers the load to the floor slab, which distributes it over more area. Some re-bar wouldn’t hurt in this construction, either. Note that Port of Tacoma pours the slab as thick as the total of the running rail, rail used for ties, AND the dolbies used to space the ties off the subgrade; likely 18” thick total, with the rail and ties fully encased.

I agree with everything Dennis has said, he's got a very good point about the importance of finishing and also of using a curing agent.

One minor clarification:



They're not actually spring clips, though I've seen those used as well. The #62 clips are just small solid metal clips designed to hold the rail in place. They can be bolted or welded into position, if you're embedding them you'd want to weld them in place.

Here's a catalog showing the clips, they're shown at the bottom of the page:
http://www.akrailroad.com/crane_runway.html

We tend to generically call any of them "#62 clips", but there are actually a couple sizes and styles. Obviously you'd use the one that best fits the rail you're installing. Since we typically work with large rails, #62's are the size we use most, but for smaller rails a #103 or #106 might fit better.

They're inexpensive, easy to install and weld and will last a long time. Since they don't use any spring tension, they won't "wear out" and fatigue over time.

This thread has some interesting ideas, and I'm sure there's room for improvement, particularly if we were to undertake other similiar projects, but I think the photos Chris posted don't show the full story of the FEBT's pad (nor the interior shop track).

As Dennis points out, we built the track to handle the expected loads, and the EBT loadings and frequency are hardly that seen by the Port of Tacoma. Plus, the EBT's yard is not a museum ground to display artifacts, but is itself one of the artifacts, which has design considerations. In fact, the EBT's current paintshop where this work was done is the second shop on the site, replacing an older, larger predecessor. The predecessor had a pit between the rails, which is now off-center for the current, smaller shop.

Inside the shop, the previous construction was rail with gauge bars directly on the floor slab. At the old track pit, one of the existing rails was bridged over the pit on small wooden ties. The opposite rail had indeed punched through the floor. We improved this by removing the broken slab pieces, filling the holes and the pit with compacted gravel, using rebar to hold gauge, and pouring a new floor up flush to the railhead.

http://www.dementia.org/~adams/ebt/2005aug6/2005aug6thumb.html

Outside, the track straddles one wall of the track pit for about 30 ft. We did not want to destroy the old pit wall, so the ground inside/outside the pit wall was leveled off. Upon this base was laid the rail crossties, spanning both pit walls and anchored laterally by rebar pins into the wall cap, atop which were welded the running rails.

http://www.dementia.org/~adams/ebt/2005aug13/2005aug13thumb.html

The area around the crossties was filled with gravel, compacted, and covered with a vapor barrier. Rebar was installed to help strengthen the slab, the flangeways formed, and the slab poured. In the second posted photo, the near side of the track has not been fully prepped in order to reduce trip hazards until we were ready to pour it. The slab was covered while curing to retard evaporation.

http://www.dementia.org/~adams/ebt/2006may8/2006may8thumb.html

Unfortunately the rails do straddle the pit wall, but the wall is quite thick (relative to the 3ft gauge), and we expect the rail crossties to hold up no worse under the expected loads than the wood ones which had been used since 1933. Given our limited budget and labor and load demands, I think we have a slab that will more than handle the demands placed upon it.