(The following article by Lola Sherman was posted on the San Diego Union-Tribune website on October 19.)
DEL MAR, Calif. -– I’ve been working on the railroad / all the livelong day.
Those opening lines of a traditional American folk song come to mind as crews work – in this case, not all the livelong day but all night long – to replace decades-old ties on the railroad tracks here.
And in the rain.
The work is being done by Amtrak under contract with the North County Transit District, which owns the rail line.
It must be undertaken at night because 50 trains a day – Amtrak’s intercity service, NCTD’s Coasters running between Oceanside and San Diego, and Burlington Northern Santa Fe’s freights – use the tracks the rest of the time.
The $200,000 project got under way early yesterday morning at the Coast Boulevard intersection with the tracks in Del Mar.
Sy Morales, a senior Amtrak engineer for track and structures, and his crew of 10 workers arrived around 10 p.m. to get everything ready, laying out the new ties and putting splotches of orange paint on the ties to be removed.
They’re taking out the 8-foot-long wooden ties, which date to 1947, and replacing them with new 9-foot wooden ties for more stability.
“It’s a big job,” Morales said.
When the project is finished, the trains will be allowed to travel 65 miles an hour instead of the 30 mph they are slowed to during construction, he said.
Ron Hyatt, assistant general manager for Amtrak, said the rail line was upgraded during World War II and afterward because of defense needs. Otherwise, he said, “San Diego would have had an old spur line.”
With the preparations completed, the crews awaited the passing of Amtrak Train 96 at 12:30 a.m. yesterday, the last of the night. A dispatcher in Pomona turned the rails over to them a few minutes later.
They had less than five hours to work – counting getting everything put back together – before the first Coaster would need the tracks at 5:30 a.m. yesterday.
“I want to average 100 (ties) a night,” Morales said.
Only about one tie in three is removed at any one time. A different set of ties will be replaced whenever a new project is scheduled.
Richard Walker, maintenance-of-way manager for the transit district, said the last time ties were replaced on the two-mile stretch through Del Mar, from Coast Boulevard to Torrey Pines Road, was in 1990.
The periodic replacement is necessary to conform with requirements of the Federal Railroad Administration, Walker said.
Unlike when ties were replaced in the 1940s, most of the hard work today is done by machine rather than manual labor.
A big yellow contraption about 20 feet long and 15 feet high rides the rails with a claw protruding from underneath its middle, grabbing the old ties and pulling them almost effortlessly from underneath the rails.
Some of the old ties broke apart or splintered in the process yesterday morning, but most remained intact – demonstrating that the 1947 ties “last pretty good (even) on the ocean,” Hyatt said as waves lapped 50 yards to the west.
The machine doubles back on the track after it has pulled out 50 ties and replaces them in reverse, its claw picking up new ties and shoving them under the rails.
A smaller machine runs behind it to reinsert metal plates on which the rails sit at each tie to keep them in place. The plates are about 12 inches long, with grooves for the rails.
The rails “fit snugly like in a Tupperware container,” Hyatt said.
Another machine usually pounds the spikes into the metal plates, but it was temporarily out of service, so crews used an air compressor to insert the spikes.
In this high-tech world, there’s still room, however, for a man with a shovel – to return and smooth some of the ballast rock under the rails.
The work on the ties will continue today, Friday and Saturday.
Morales expects to finish replacing the targeted 1,500 ties by Nov. 7.