(The following story by Jeff Tucker appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain website on March 7.)
PUEBLO, Colo. — In remote places along the vast Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad lines and at road crossings and on bridges, you can find the work of a relatively quiet manufacturing company that has been hammering out railroad track sections for three years in Pueblo.
Think of them as the full-scale, real-life equivalent of the old Lionel track segments; 40- to 60-foot-long pieces of track that, at their lightest, can weigh slightly less than three Ford Explorers.
The tracks are made at the L.B. Foster track plant in Pueblo; a relatively small operation leasing land behind Midtown Shopping Center from the BNSF railroad.
L.B. Foster opened shop more than three years ago, said Plant Director Bart Peterson, and while the heady days of westward expansion fueled by the railroads are long over, there’s still plenty of work for Peterson and his 12-member crew.
“Our business volume has increased about 20 percent per year over the last three years,” he said. “There’s not a whole lot of new rail destinations, but with the mergers taking place, the expansion by Burlington Northern and Union Pacific east where they are doing a lot of double- and triple-tracking . . . just the maintenance alone on the railroads is a tremendous undertaking every year. It’s still a big business.”
L.B. Foster’s Pueblo plant stays busy for three reasons.
The company’s prefabricated rails are used for bridges. They are used for road crossings and they are used for repairs after train derailments.
The prefabricated tracks are handy at road crossings because it doesn’t take as long to install them.
Cities aren’t usually wild about the prospect of intersections being closed for weeks at a time. Having the new tracks already built speeds up the process.
On bridges, using prefabricated tracks is safer, Peterson said.
“There are more bridges along a rail line than people might think,” he said. “It’s easier to build (track) in a controlled environment, rather than hauling all of the equipment and supplies to the site.”
Finally, L.B. Foster will load seven of its track pieces into rail cars that are placed at various points along a rail line, at 100-mile intervals, to provide emergency replacement segments when a train derails.
“When a train derails, it pretty much tears through everything in its path,” Peterson said.
With the prefabricated tracks at 100-mile intervals, the railroad can use them to patch segments of rail that have been damaged, once the wreckage has been removed.
The patches allow the railroad to quickly get its lines operational once the wreckage has been cleared. Peterson said the railroad will then schedule a crew to come back to the site and replace the patch.
According to the Association of American Railroads, more than 1.7 million tons of freight was shipped along America’s railroads in 2002, its most recent figures available online.
The gross revenue from that freight was more than $36.7 billion, making it important to get the railroad open as quickly and as safely as possible
L.B. Foster’s operation is efficient.
Wooden ties shipped from Denver roll down a conveyor belt where crews place tie plates, spikes and other equipment in a rough approximation of where they will be needed.
When the last of the ties for that particular section are delivered from the conveyor, two steel rails shipped from Rocky Mountain Steel Mills here in Pueblo are hooked to a crane and swung into place.
The gauge of the rails is set, the tie plates are secured in place and the crew begins to start holes for the rail spikes with a large drill.
The spikes are started with a sledge hammer, reminiscent of the gandy dancers of the past, but are finished with a jack hammer.
To get an idea of how quickly Peterson’s crew can finish the track pieces, he said one piece takes about a half-hour. L.B. Foster goes through two semi loads of ties in a day, Peterson said, and they make enough track to fill about 500 rail cars in a year.
Peterson said that BNSF’s presence in Pueblo, along with the proximity of Rocky Mountain Steel, made the city an ideal place for the company to open its shop.
Most of the materials used in the process haven’t travelled that far.
“Our steel comes out of Rocky Mountain and that’s another reason why we’re here,” he said. “Rocky Mountain is the only rail manufacturer left in the (western) U.S. and we’re trying to use mostly Colorado-based industry.”
L.B. Foster is a Pittsburgh-based company.
In addition to the Pueblo track plant, The company is one of the leading providers of concrete railroad ties, used in most light rail systems. The company also provides sound walls and other construction equipment for highway and bridge projects.
Foster’s prefabricated track operation is probably the smallest portion of what the company does, Peterson said.