Ft. Lewis Rerail Ops

The first car was fairly straight forword. Here part of the crew installs track grabbers that will be used to pull the rails back into the proper 56 1/2 inch gauge. They set about five of these devices under this car as the rail wasn't too badly damaged here.

At the same time, another part of the crew was setting these rerailing frogs in front of the wheels. When the locomotive pulls the car, the wheels will ride up the frogs and hopefully set themselves down on the rail where they belong.

The boxcar was going to be a much larger problem. Not only were all wheels on the ground but one rail was bent over 90 degrees.

 

This car was going to have to be moved two car lengths down the track before the rails were good enough for it to run on. Since the wheels were sitting on the bent rail, the crane was used to get the weight off the rail.

 

 

So that they could cut the rail at the rear of the car.

And then use the weight of the car to rotate the rail back up to it's proper position. They then spiked it and used track grabbers to set the gauge.

 

 

 

The track isn't anywhere near good enough for the locomotive so they pulled the car with this steel rope.

 

In the course of moving it two car lengths over this damaged track, it went on the ground several times. It went down once so hard that the locomotive could not move it and the crane was brought back in to rerail it again.

 

 

And yet again it went back on the ground.

 

But in the end, they got it to a good section of track and it is seen here arriving at the yard, free at last.

 

 

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