iocase

There’s a huge variety. Grinding trains usually travel at around 30km/h and it looks like what Hollywood thinks an emergency brake application looks like

Track POV of a grinding train

They usually have a water tender at the end with a water cannon to spray down fires started by the grinding train itself.

Railway ballast cleaning to remove fines and tamp

Sleeper replacement

Yeah by a long shot. Railroads spend 1-3% of the capital cost on maintenance. So if it cost $3 million to build a km of track they spend roughly $30-90k/year. It might not look like it since tracks are just kind of always “there” but there is a decent amount of work you need to do pretty much constantly.

The stones underneath the tracks and sleepers is called ballast and it needs to be rough, angular rock of a certain size. It’s an engineered fill material that’s designed to lock together and hold the rails in place. Every train that passes by does a couple of things at once. It cyclically loads the ballast and breaks down those sharp edges that lock it together. At the same time the force of the wheels on the rails contributes to fatigue causing microcracks to form on the rail surface.

If you leave rails unmaintained long enough (by gross tonnage BTW. Rail can last a long time if it’s hardly used at all) the track will start pumping, where it compresses and expands as each axle passes over it. You’ll start lifting the subsoil up into the ballast ruining its ability to hold the track in alignment even more. Also, microcracks can combine enough that the railhead begins spalling and eventually the cracks can combine enough that the rail itself can fracture well before it’s service life tonnage.

To fix this you have to tamp ballast every X number of tons, grind the railhead every Y tons, and replace the ballast every Z tons .etc

Basically every part of the permanent way is some kind of wear item that needs maintenance. Mind you, only mainline track needs to be perfect. As long as speed limits are low enough along with an inspection, you can run on degraded secondary rails or spurs safely. It just wears it out even faster.

It’s like carcinization, the tendency for everything to evolve into a crab body plan.

Railinization? The tendency for every hare brained tech idea that touches transportation to evolve into railroads?

The issue is you need to grind the tracks multiple times a year on busy routes, along with ballast tamping or replacement. That’s set by total gross tonnage not by a set time span, and these maintenance items are not optional. Tamping prevents pumping and rail fatigue which can be catastrophic if you allow it to degrade and suddenly fail. Rail grinding removes microcracks created by fatigue due to every wheel passing over it. Grinding deletes the cracks, but if you leave it for too long the cracks grow and can total the rail. 10 minutes per panel is a long time when you need to maintain tens of thousands of kms of track.

Even a short distance between two towns is a maintenance headache. It could take weeks to remove the panels entirely and that’s before you get started doing maintenance at all… All you’ve accomplished is removing a maintenance obstacle you put there in the first place. Then you have to put it all back when you’re done…

A railroad typically spends 1-3% of the entire cost to build a km of track just to maintain it every year. That’s a big operating cost that eats into rail budgets already (part of why I believe they should all be nationalized to better align public incentives with a natural monopoly but that’s beyond this conversation.)

For reference, most rail costs around $1-3 million per km to build, $5-10 million or more within urban areas due to land acquisition. Typical railroad maintenance is somewhere around $10 000-$30 000 per km per year with unrestricted access. 20 mins round trip per panel (probably half an hour with deadtime between panels moving tools and gear) that’s a massive amount of increasedl about costs and service interruption.

I’m interested to see how it impacts maintenance for the permanent way. I don’t think it helps at all… Reballasting, tamping, changing sleepers, railhead grinding .etc all need to go places where these panels are, so now you have to remove them, do your maintenance, and put them back?

Instead they just put it in a place where they have to be disconnected and removed to reballast or tamp the permanent way, or for railhead grinding, or for sleeper replacement, or for any maintenance task that needs access between the tracks…

Would that word have basically meant all of the British isles since Irish independence happened far after WWII?

Ancient Chinese recording that half the world died in a minor scuffle so pwease Mr. Emperor I pwomise my taxes will be low for the next 10 years because they all died 🥺

The guy who suspected washing would reduce mortality (and did a study proving it) was made a laughingstock and was driven mad by his colleagues refusal to wash their god damn hands.

He was proven right eventually but I think I would go insane too if I knew it was directly causing my patients to die, and suggesting it as a way to reduce patient mortality made me into a laughingstock.

If you pick right there’s a small but nonzero chance that you and your brothers can work to overthrow the emperor in a temple rebellion

Same with konjac noodles. Basically no nutrition in them so they keep you from feeling hungry.

I heard the quote in passing but can’t find it. It was translated from a cuneiform tablet something to the effect of “a skilled cuneiform scribe can write as fast as the mouth moved”

Dr. Irving Finkel has said the same. The Babylonians and others managed massive bureaucracies at the time handling thousands of letters, court transcripts, and official dictations. There was more than enough practice for a scribe to get fast at it.

I felt like adding a tangent that apparently cuneiform scribes could write as fast as a person talks. To do the same in English we have to use shorthand. I think it’s neat that cuneiform is itself both a shorthand and the entire language.

I always thought it would be from fire pits reducing ore into metal. Suddenly your firepit rocks have little beads of copper metal in them for some reason. Cause and effect again.

I’m really glad they’re showing them in full PPE too. That’s actually really cool to see from so long ago. The West only took safety seriously in like the 90s really. You used to be able to smoke anywhere at a refinery up until the 90s in Alberta for example (barring areas with red tape and no smoking signs)

Does the 25% air, 25% water, 50% dirt rule apply to pineapples?

Happy birthday lemmy.zip!

And you can thank those two portable suns for giving us anime and hentai

Also this is like mandating printers that can’t print pictures of dicks

Yeah you’re right, so instead of half a century maybe we should say they’ve been doing it wrong for the entire history of their company

Is that better?