(The following article by Tom Feeney was posted on the Newark Star-Ledger website on October 31.)
NEWARK, N.J. — These are the signs of autumn in Glen Ridge: the color on the trees, the diesel fumes in the wind, the burst of water onto the rails.
Autumn is when fallen leaves settle on the steep stretch of NJ Transit tracks just east of the Glen Ridge Station. They leave behind a dark ooze slippery enough to humble a 100-ton locomotive. “Black rail,” the railroad people call it.
And so twice a day, a four-car contraption known as Aqua Track passes by on the Montclair-Boonton Line, its diesel-powered locomotive grumbling, a thin curtain of water blowing out over the tracks from beneath the flatbed car in the rear.
“This is how we keep the trains running on time,” Ralph Blauvelt, an NJ Transit equipment engineer, said last week as the Aqua Track pulled away from the Broad Street Station in Newark and headed west on the Montclair-Boonton Line.
Black rail is an issue around the state and beyond, but because the tracks just east of the Glen Ridge Station climb one of the steepest grades in the NJ Transit system, the area was always among the most vulnerable.
When the rails were stained with ooze, NJ Transit’s trains couldn’t get purchase at Glen Ridge. Westbound, they couldn’t make it up the hill. Eastbound, they couldn’t brake in time for the station.
“You ended up with slippery-rail-related delays,” said Bill Duggan, NJ Transit’s director of rail operations.
Four years ago, NJ Transit bought the gear for Aqua Track and mounted it on a flatbed car. The machine has since become a veritable sign of autumn on the lines where the leaf problem was most acute: the Montclair-Boonton Line and the Gladstone Branch of the Morristown Line.
It passes by twice a day, six days a week, between the second week in October and the end of November. It makes occasional passes along other NJ Transit lines, too.
The machine, which is operated by a six-person crew, covers 234 miles of rail on an average weekday.
The leaf-cleaning train consists of four cars — a diesel-powered locomotive, two tank cars and the Aqua Track.
Each of the tank cars carries 10,000 gallons of water, enough for about six hours of rail cleaning.
The Aqua Track has two high-powered pumps, each driven by growling, 250-horsepower diesel engines whose exhaust fumes hang heavy in the air above the flatbed car.
The pumps pull the water from the tanker cars and blast it through two nozzles near the rear wheels on the flatbed car.
“The nozzles are aimed at the sweet spot,” Blauvelt said, pointing over the back of the flatbed car to the area where the steel rails are most shiny.
The sweet spot is where the wheels of the train car make contact with the steel rails. The rails are 2 1/2 inches wide. The sweet spot is about the width of a dime. When the black ooze builds up there, the trains slip and fall behind schedule, Blauvelt said.
The water is shot at the sweet spot through the nozzles at a pressure of 10,000 pounds per square inch. That’s between three and five times stronger than the type of pressure washer usually used in residential applications like deck scrubbing.
The blast of the Aqua Track is so strong it would bore a hole into the steel rails if it didn’t keep moving, Blauvelt said.
And so it moved, at about 30 mph, west past the Bloomfield Station, where commuters on the platform looked up from their newspapers to study the skirt of mist that trailed it, and up the hill toward Glen Ridge.
Though the Aqua Track has been running regularly since Oct. 16, small spots of ooze were still on the rails this particular morning. The battle against the leaves will be pitched for another month, Blauvelt said. The leaves will continue to fall, and the ones that have already fallen will continue to blow onto the track.
“You would think the trains would blow them out of the way, but just the opposite happens,” Blauvelt said.
The leaves that gather on the shoulders of the rail bed get sucked back up onto the tracks when the trains whoosh by, he said.
“We have to stay on top of it, or else the problem just keeps coming back,” he said.
So far, staying on top of the problem has paid dividends for NJ Transit.
There were 226 trains delayed by slippery rails in 2002, the last year NJ Transit relied strictly on sand and metal brushes to clear away the ooze. The number of delays in the three years combined since the agency paid $420,000 for Aqua Track is just over half that number, Duggan said.
The signs of autumn in Glen Ridge are far less likely now to include the sound of commuters grumbling about a train stuck on a hill.