MoW: Oil Spraying Train and Rail Joints

Marty Bernard posted two photos with the comment:

CB&Q Oiler, Why Oil the Rails?

These two shots were taken of a CB&Q oiler on August 17, 1964 at Chadwick, IL. Nozzles aimed at both sides of each rail at the front of the car oiled the rails.

The SD9 mid-train was pictured in my previous post.

Kam Miller in Facebook wrote: "In the days when ice was added to refrigerator cars, the ice was contained in what was called a "bunker" at the ends of each car, under where the ice was put in at the roof hatches at the ends of the car. Salt was added to it since they found out that adding salt to the ice, besides melting it a bit, also made the ice colder. The result was called 'brine'. Either fans or vents pushed air over the ice to cool off the insides of the car as it traveled. Many big yards had icing stations inside the yard where the reefer trains were re-iced during the trips.

"The reefers also had drains at the ends which let the brine leak out, and of course, it leaked onto the rails and trucks. Naturally, maintenance of reefers included looking at the trucks to see that the salt brine didn't mess them up too bad, either."

[There were a lot of comments on this post. I discuss their content below.]

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Some of the comments called it a weed sprayer. Marty posted the following to show what a CB&Q sprayer looked like back in the day.

DeBruler

I zoom in on the photo of the oil sprayer so that you can see that the nozzles are aimed at the sides of the rail and avoid the railhead. 

Digitally Zoomed

The oil would help keep the brine from touching the rails and causing rust. One comment also mentioned that the brine is hard on the wood ties.

Scott Dolanc: CB&Q and other railroads would spray used engine oil on the joint bars and bolts that held the rails together to protect them from the brine Marty talks about. If a rail broke or some other maintenance needed done, the bolts and joint bars wouldn't be completely rusted together and would be easier to get apart to work on the track structure. Very important on busy mainlines.

Ross Posch: Remember the use of oil on the bolted joints to avoid Sun Kinks.

Bob Parkin: CB&Q Oiler 211581 at Chadwick, IL on August 17, 1964. Oil was sprayed on the rails to reduce the corrosion caused by the salt brine leaking from the ice-cooled refrigerated cars.

Richard Ferzely: The only time I saw that done was summer of 1983. I was working out of Sterling CO. We ran on the UP from Sterling about 25 miles and got back on the BN close to Brush CO. UP section men with hand sprayers walked and oiled every set of angle bars. It was short heavy jointed rail at the time so it took almost all summer to do the 25 miles.

Roger Stabler: In the days of jointed rail, the joints were oiled to help with expansion and contraction.

Michael Armstrong: Rail joints were lubricated to prevent what is known as a “frozen joint”. Rail expands and contracts and it is desired to allow the joint components to move (although controlled movement is minimal) to avoid joint pull-aparts in cold temperatures and kinked rail in hot temperatures.

Tony Verrecchio: Marty Bernard You know when we had stick rail they walked it every day.

Marty Bernard: Tony Verrecchio I remember.

Rob Gardnerv[In response to a comment by Marty that he did not know the rail slid in the joint.]: Marty Bernard the key is alternating round and Oval shaped holes in the joint bars coupled with a built in gapping ability in the spacing of the holes and the fact that the bolts are always smaller than the holes drilled in the rail that they pass through. Jointed rail has to be able to expand and expand with the ambient air Temps. When you're laying rail in the heat of summer you leave little if any Gao when you assemble each joint. Likewise, if you're laying rail in the dead of winter you leave as much of a gap as possible to give the rail room to expand in each adjacent joint with pushing the adjacent rails. Long trains rolling down the track also increase the effective temperature of the rail as the train passes. Hence, on hot summer days, most railroads run heat patrols once the temperature hits 100F to look for the telltale signs of unstable rail and they will post temporary speed restrictions to minimize the chance for track to buckle under a moving train.

Mal Stephens: Marty Bernard even though the joints are plated and bolted,, there is enough tension in the rails from the temperature change for the rails to slide away in the cold until the pressure is onto the bolts,, as the bolt holes are a bigger than the bolts,, and for the rails to expand and close again when the rail get hot,, If the rails corrode enough with the salt reaction this will not happen.

Marty Bernard shared

Jeffrey Varney: I also remember that we used to have a crossing gate problem at the old Lake Cook Road crossing at Deerfield. During the winter, the snowplows would dump a lot of salt into and over the road crossing during a snowstorm. When the salt melted the snow, all of the water would run down into the crossing. Soon, the salt water concentration was so high that the crossing gates would activate and stop traffic. I don't remember how many times the maintainer went and checked the crossing and advised the gates were working properly and the salt water in the crossing was to blame. After many times, I told the police to send a fire truck over and flush out the crossing with the firehose. After the first time, when the gates cleared after the crossing was washed clear of the salt water, we did not receive that many calls anymore for gate problems. I would guess that the police would dispatch a fire truck to the scene and if the gates did not clear after the crossing was washed out, then they would call the railroad.

Sidney Mcwhorter: The last oiler train I remember was back in 1971. The man in charge turned in over time around the clock. The road master at the time said he was not going to pay it. The operator told him they had been and he was also.

Marty Bernard shared

Marty Bernard shared

Bob Johnston: My family was in the produce brokerage business in Paducah for almost 60 years. We brought in thousands of those reefers with fruits & vegetables from all the producing sections. In the winter from the north they put charcoal & later alcohol heaters in the bunkers to prevent freezing. Later it changed to large mechanical reefer with incentive rates. Most of them came in on the “Q”/BN as Paducah (which many people didn’t know) was the southern terminal of the Burlington. The BNSF still comes in here.

Scott Thomas: Well, I can tell you this. The rails were indeed sprayed with an oil, just not like you are thinking. The oil being sprayed on the rails was more like a tar. It served several purpose's. One was it quieted down the noise the trains made passing over the track. For freight no one cared, but it made a big difference in passenger cars. Also, it reduced vibrations in the rail and helped extend tie life. The only reason I know this is because the old Milwaukee Road track out of council bluffs, a lot of that rail still has some of the coating stuck on it. Look at the photos and zoom in on the spray car. You can clearly see the gobs of tar on the car, trucks, etc. That's no weed sprayer. If it were, where are the booms?

Marty Bernard shared

Dennis DeBruler: If you click the "post" link in the top line, you will see several comments explaining that this was done for brine protection. The railroads were particularly concerned about the rail joints being frozen with rust. Rust made it difficult to remove the bolts if a 39' "stick" of rail needed to be replaced. More significantly, it did not allow the joint to slide when the rail expanded and contracted. This was back before rail was strong enough to handle contraction and before anchors were invented to help avoid kinks when the rail expanded.

It occurred to me that many Millenniums might not even know what jointed rail is. I live in western Chciagoland and the closest jointed mainline that I have seen is the former Rock Island route in Ottawa, IL, that is now owned by CSX. When BNSF replaces the track in crossings or replaces turnouts in their mainline, they temporarily connect the new rails to the existing rails with joint bars. So I've been able to get some closeups of joints. (There is so much ballast on top of the ties in this photo because they have done just a first pass of surfacing (tamping) the tracks.) The gaps are larger than what was used in jointed rails because these joints will be welded during the night. But jointed rail did have gaps to leave room for expansion in the Summer without kinks. And the joints allowed contraction in the Winter without breaking the rails.

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Jointed rail was a maintenance nightmare. But before continuous welded rail (CWR) could be used, the tensile strength of steel had to be increased to withstand the internal forces induced by contraction and rail anchors had to be developed to hold the rail from kinking when it expanded. Also, special trains had to be developed to carry quarter-mile long segments of rail. So rail joints that were frozen with rust would give you the disadvantages of CWR without the mitigating factors of increased strength and better anchors.

Pete got tired of all of the comments claiming it was spraying weeds. (And then just two comments after this one was another person claiming the train was doing weed control.)

J Pete Hedgpeth: I wonder from all the "palavering" on here about this subject that if most of you guys really understand how corrosive that salt brine is that used to run out of the drains on those "pre mechanical refrigeration" reefers with ice bunkers on each end. It does, as some have pointed out, take a certain "measure" of salt added to the ice at re icing points. This salt was added in the amounts specified by the "icing instructions" which accompanied the waybill The water, with a high salt concentration was collected at the bottom of the bunder and ran out trough a tube leading outside and pointed away from the car. This highly corrosive mixture poured out sometimes in fairly high volumes. If you have ever seen a "reefer train" heading around an elevated curve you will see a fog consisting of "flying salt water" drifting out. think of the thousand and thousand and thousands of salt water pouring on steel and you have a vile, corrosive soup collecting on everything metal on or about the RO"W. This stuff did it's destruction on anything metal..ie rail, joints, bridge members etc. This oiling was not done just to "get rid of excess oil"...it was done to preserve and reduce the corrosion of anything metal along the row. In my very early days in the RI training program I spent a couple of days in very cold December weather along with the roadmaster on the "Government Bridge across the Mississippi at Rock Island-Davenport appling a goop oiling substance on the metal struts, ties and other supporting members of the bridge. This to reduce the corrosiong at this critical point on the RI. Think about it...Every shipment from CAlifonia (FFV) Fresh Fruit and Vetgetable and Omaha ( hanging meat) passed over this bridge and dumped this vile mixture on the bridge.

Because the railroads and their suppliers used PTC technology to implement old-fashioned fixed block signaling rather than newer methods that were enabled by PTC technology such as moving block signaling, some non-welded joints are permanent to make insulated joints. I put red rectangles around the three insulated joints that are just west of Fairfield Ave. in Downers Grove, IL. The close joint looks like it used four bolts instead of eight but that is because they alternate the direction in which the bolts are inserted. The holes along the left side of the photo are where joints were made between the crossing track on the left and the existing track. Since this is a few days after the track was replaced, the joints have been welded and the bolts and bars are removed.

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I used to ride the Pennsy from Fort Wayne to Chicago in the late 1960s so I experienced the clickety-clack of the wheels on the joints. While I was trackside, a coal train came rolling through on some temporary joints. At 1:28 I zeroed in on the source of the clickety-clack,. Imagine what this train would sound like if that noise was happening every 39' for the entire length of the train! [DeBruler]

This was the caboose in the above oiler train.

safe_image for photo
A comment on a post provided this link with the information "a regular 30' NE-1 Waycar." This comment was in reply to an observation that a waycar looked like a drover caboose because of all of the windows.