12 February 2009
Railroad Crew Sets Blaze for Track Work
Winona Minnesota USA - A high-speed train
didn't catch Winona's Canadian Pacific tracks on fire 11 Feb 2009, local newspapers report.
Commuters along Franklin Street may have noticed flames along the rail, but the strips were lit on purpose.
Maintenance crews started the small blazes to heat up the rails as they replaced sections of the track's switches.
It looked like a scene from "Back to the Future Part III."
The crews were replacing worn out "frogs" - transition rail pieces that connect two lines of tracks.
Frogs let trains move from one section of track to another.
The tracks shrank in the cold, and the crews had to heat the steel to fit new pieces and bolts.
In the past, crews would light an oily rope, but that wasn't very environmentally friendly.
Now they do controlled burns by lighting flammable strips along the track.
"It's basically the same concept that they used 100 years ago," Canadian Pacific spokesman Jeff Johnson said.
Canadian Pacific spends more than $800 million a year on track maintenance, he said.
Removing the frogs would normally trigger electrical currents, automatically causing nearby crossing guards to drop under the
assumption a train was coming on another track.
The crews rerouted the safeguard wires, keeping the guards up until they were done.
No trains passed while the crews worked.
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