(The following story by Paul Nussbaum appeared on the Philadelphia Inquirer website on November 7. Dragan Jankovic is a member of BLET Division 71 in Philadelphia.)
PHILADELPHIA — As early autumn darkness fell on SEPTA’s Overbrook maintenance yard this week, the three-man crew of OVRB3 girded for their nightly battle.
Thirty thousand gallons of water were loaded into a rail tanker car painted with a big, misleading “Corn Products” label.
Two 275-gallon plastic tubs were filled with goo the color and consistency of pancake batter.
A flatbed car was rigged with a powerful motor, generator and a tangle of hoses and lines.
With a diesel locomotive at one end of their little train and a gutted passenger car at the other, SEPTA conductor Jack Neuman, engineer Dragan Jankovic and mechanic Dave Logan were ready once again to challenge the implacable foe: Autumn leaves.
Fallen leaves – and the resulting “slippery rails” – are as dependable a hallmark of the season as Halloween and college football. For SEPTA and its passengers, leaves are an annual headache, turning rails into friction-free skid zones that send trains slipping through stops and creeping into stations.
Last year, 1,344 delays were blamed on slippery rails – and that was a good year. In 2002, 2,352 trains were delayed by slippery rails.
This year, the worst is still ahead, as most leaves are still on the trees, not on the tracks.
“We expect the worst period will be from mid-November to early December,” said Ray Courtney, chief officer of SEPTA’s rail division.
Leaves are the bane of railroads, because when crushed on the tracks, they leave an oil-like residue that kills traction. And a little residue goes a long way, since the point of contact between a train wheel and a rail is “about the size of my fingernail,” Courtney said.
Railroads have tried many weapons in their long-running battle against leaves. Freight locomotives typically have built-in sanders to spit sand onto rails. Other passenger railroads have tried everything from scrubbers to leaf-blasting lasers. Over the years, SEPTA has tried wire scrapers, sanding machines and manually deposited sand wafers.
Now, three leaf trains, including OVRB3, head out six nights a week to attack leaves on 225 miles of track with high-pressure blasts of water and low-pressure trails of abrasive gel.
Crew members of the Overbrook train fired up their pressure washer, scouring the tracks with water fired through eight spinning nozzles at 10,000 pounds per square inch. The blasts left whorls the size of silver dollars on the tracks, and not a glimmer of leaf scum.
This was not a night for applying gel, since the leaf fall was still light, but when Logan turns on the gel machine, it lays down a paste of sand and metal shavings and water.
The Overbrook train cruises through the night at 15-20 miles an hour (“about 10 miles an hour if we’re gellin’,” says Logan) along the R3 to Elwyn, the R8 to Chestnut Hill, and the R5 to Paoli and back. Two other trains, based out of Wayne Junction, get most of the rest of the routes (the R7-Trenton line, on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, goes untreated because of its heavy traffic and relatively light leaf load).
The leaf trains are finished by about 5 a.m., just in time for another day of commuting adventures. SEPTA officials acknowledge they will never eradicate the “slippery rail” problem entirely, but they like the effect of the high-pressure washers.
Train delays blamed on slippery rails are down about 42 percent since the spraying equipment was installed in 2003, SEPTA spokesman Felipe Suarez said.
“We’re very pleased with the results as it has been tremendously effective in reducing the number of delays,” Suarez said.