The Wiscasset Waterville and Farmington Railways is having their annual spring work weekend this weekend. The goal this weekend is to ballast and tamp track laid during last falls work weekend. Around 800 ft of main, siding and three switches need to be ballasted, lined and tamped.

Pictures from Friday.



























Saturday pics

Look at the turnout of members and how many members are wielding a shovel or rake. WW&F is always adding something new or improving the old. Great work, always.

So now I know why I gravitated to that lobstah roll at the Celtic Festival I attended today..... Jenny and I were subconsciously wishing we were back up in that crew!

Great photos. I miss being there but I will make it there in early June.

Thanks for sharing. Can you give a summary of all that was accomplished?

Hi,

Great work. Looks good.

What are the three (3) boilers?

Thanks.

Doug vV

Hi Doug,

Mu understanding is that the boilers were culverts installed by the original railroad that were dug out again and replaced recently when the track was re-laid. I don't think these ones are locomotive boilers, though the shell of the boiler of the railroad's first engine (Wiscasset & Quebec No. 1, ex-Sandy River RR No. 3) is supposed to have been used as a culvert a few miles of the line in Whitefield and is presumably still there.

Geology doesn't change much so this section of the WW&F is very wet -- drainage remains a problem!

-Philip Marshall

I'd venture to say there was a run on Ben-Gay at the local drug store.
Good work guys, great turnout for the work session.

Great pictures. WW&F is by far our most favorite railroad...or maybe Cumbres & Toltec...or maybe East Broad Top... Oh well, our favorite two-footer!

Who knew a two-foot tamping machine existed. Nice work!

Thanks!

Stewart Rhine and I were talking about that question just this afternoon. The Talyllyn Railway and the Welsh Highland Railway in the UK both have two-foot gauge (more or less) tamping machines, so there are at least three in the world, but the WW&F's is certainly the only one in North America.

-Philip Marshall

Regarding two-foot gauge tampers, it's my understanding that the Welsh Highland and Talyllyn tampers are both essentially production models made to work on 2-ish foot gauge. And I know that there is at least 1 production model tamper on the Australian two-foot sugar cane lines. The WW&F tamper most definitely is not a production model. Here's information on how we created it:

The basis for the tamper is a "Big Joe" stacker. A stacker is like a small battery-powered, hand driven forklift. We got the stacker (auction or something, I forget how exactly) specifically for the up-down. The name for the whole contraption is thus "Big Joe".

Next we built a carriage in the shop to put it on, then mounted it on the front. When we needed to use it, we rented an air compressor and put it on the back. Without the compressor it was front-heavy, so we weighed it down with scrap ties. Initially it only got use during the work weekends when we rented the compressor. Oh, and we greatly modified the forklift part to have the structure for carrying the tampers (which are air-powered jitterbugs).

Somebody donated a trailer-mounted Lindsey compressor to us, which after some TLC to get it reliably operable we mounted on the back of the car and piped it to the front. We removed the tires "temporarily". We ended up giving it a larger gas tank, mounted outside the compressor unit.

As the stacker was battery-powered, we found that it didn't last too long on the continuous up-and-down of tamping. We had to jump it to the battery of the compressor. Somebody else donated a hydraulic motor, and eventually we hydraulic-ized the up-down. As it only has 2 sets of tampers on each side, it has an in-out feature as well, which also hydraulic driven. So we have to go over each piece of track that we tamp twice.

Next somebody said that since we have a hydraulic motor, why don't we make it self-propelled? So we did that. There's another motor somewhere underneath that makes it go. It moves a stately 1.5 mph, give or take a few tenths. To tow it anywhere we remove the drive chain.

As you can guess, the device is pretty loud.

Sunday pictures. I forgot my camera so these were all taken with my phone.















































The last two are from Thursday.

Very nice - keep up the good work. Wish I was closer.

Please pardon my ignorance but is there some sort of advantage to not using tie plates? just an observation...

/Andrew

It's simply that tie plates wouldn't be historically correct.