Delaware and Raritan River Railroad-General Discussion

A few pieces of the rubber insert have small cracks and the asphalt around those parts is slowly starting to degrade at the points where it meets the rubber insert. On one side a small chunk is missing. It’s not much but I worry about how these roads will hold up long term.

It should also be noted that so far is is the only road showing these signs of wear as far as I can tell, so I would hazard a guess this is being caused by the heavy truck traffic this road frequently sees.

He worries a lot about bridges and roads, have you noticed?

Track alignment machine, ballast hopper and tamper are working at Okerson Rd. Looks like they will be headed east.
There is more than one crew working. Gonna guess about 3 weeks to do Fairfield-Yellobrook and a week to align and tamp.
Weather permitting, they'll make that date.
And that "kink" is no biggie. They have the ability to pick and straighten.

Dcell wrote:He worries a lot about bridges and roads, have you noticed?

It's a decent point that was made. These new crossings are definitely not state of the art, they're more "bare bones" for lack of better terminology. And asphalt is NOT what it used to be decades ago. They would have been better off going with concrete panels like Omni or Omega. But then again, not enough rail traffic to justify that upgrade. We'll see how it holds up long term. I predict snow plows will chew up the rubber inserts by Year 5.

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If it's that bad, they will probably fix it by "year 5." Time is not on their side, given that COVID totally screwed things up and inflation probably ate a lot into both the state and C&D's initially planned budget(s), so cutting corners on something like the crossing's surface isn't surprising. If it works well enough to get the project done in time and stay in the budget, they can always circle back around another time to fix it.

There is not enough rail traffic on these lines to justify the big Omni upgrades, but that could change. Obviously, something big is planned, if they are fixing up the tracks to this standard

Considering they also took the old steel wrap wire off the old rails and attached it to the new track at Yellowbrook, I’m curious to see how the rest of this comes together, and also how the actual hell they expect the crossing to work when it goes in. This wire is covered in rust.

BTW - Tracks Unlimited is working the 524 - Railroad Ave stretch, Railroad Construction is doing the ballast / rail alignment at Okerson.

Has Tracks Unlimited started to use the tamper and ballast regulator they dropped at Railroad Avenue yet?

Bracdude181 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 1:35 pm Considering they also took the old steel wrap wire off the old rails and attached it to the new track at Yellowbrook, I’m curious to see how the rest of this comes together, and also how the actual hell they expect the crossing to work when it goes in. This wire is covered in rust.

As long as the wire hasn't been rusted through/been corroded, the wire will still work. Even if they got brand new steel wire, likely, it will rust at some point anyway

Aren't wires usually made of copper, which doesn't rust?

I also have no idea what "old steel wrap wire" is.....only thing I can think of is the bonding wire used with jointed rail but, as you say, that is typically copper. https://live.staticflickr.com/23/315634 ... a9cd_b.jpg

Looks like bonding wire is not copper but tinned cadmiumbronze . https://www.nationalelectricgate.com/pr ... insulated/

@lensovet This wire I speak of was much more common in the 1940s. It’s wire that’s mostly made of steel, but has one or two copper strands in the middle. Hence the name steel wrap.

@NY&LB The newer ones are solid copper but the old ones are steel wrap. The wire I speak of is attached differently than your picture though. It’s longer and runs along the bottom of the rail joint. It’s all rusted out too.

Copper is used for low resistance, good for a lot of current going long distances.

However, in this case the distance is short and the wire is big in cross section, presumably for ruggedness, so that the wire resistance might not be an issue.

More significantly, junctions between different types of wire tend to corrode over time, especially when wet (galvanic corrosion) - https://www.ampp.org/technical-research ... -corrosion . ) So since the rails are steel I suppose the idea is to make the whole circuit out of steel or something similar.

Also, in this case (the picture) the connection to the rail is made by welding. Not sure if just the fitting was welded, or some of the wire too. In any case welding can't be done with such dissimilar metals like copper and steel.

Interesting. The wire I speak of is rather close to the crossing. Haven’t seen the copper bond strand put on yet but I do see it in one or two spots on the southern where they’ve done something with the crossing circuit.

This wire though? It’s very old and completely covered in rust. Some of it was laying in a pile of the old stuff they removed and a lot of it was frayed too. I’m not sure how they expect it to work when there’s so much rust on it. I have seen this type of connection between joints before but almost always it’s with new steel or aluminum wire, with copper bond strand as well.

Example below.