My Job Duties

This is a joint bar:

They hold the rails together. There is a camera under the car that takes pictures of them from both sides (that’s why there’s 2 pictures) as we are moving. My job is to look at the pictures and say if there is a defect or not. For joint bars, defects are either missing bolts or cracks. The vibrations of trains constantly going over the joints loosens the bolts and they fall out. The majority of rails (it depends on the class, or speed limit) only require 2 bolts on each side. So this one:

is still in compliance. This one:

technically has 2 bolts on both sides, but the one is missing a nut, and will fall out soon due to the vibrations. So we flag it, and the track supervisor can do what they want with it. This one:

is not in compliance, as it only has one bolt on the one side.

This is a crack:

And it is very bad, and requires an immediate fix. You’ll notice a small red arrow above the crack – the system has crack detection, and will flag anything it thinks is a crack. The problem is, there are a lot of things that apparently look like cracks. Things like grass:

small drops of grease:

or nothing at all:

Sometimes it takes a picture of something else entirely:

The thing is, this system takes pictures of ALL the joints. Every. Single. One. Rails are typically 39 feet long, resulting in 270 joint bars every mile. We’ve tested over 100 miles in a day before (I’ve been told up to 250). And when travelling at 40 mhp, which is pretty common, this results in passing 3 joints every second. When flipping though the pictures, it takes about 0.9 seconds for each picture to load. So by the time we even see one picture, we have to look at 2 more. And for each picture you have to look for red arrows, determine if it is a crack or not (sometimes requires zooming in for closer inspection), count the number of bolts, and look closely to see if each one is loose or not.

Thankfully, there is this awesome thing called Continuous Welded Rail (CWR), in which the rails are welded instead of using joint bars, and you can sometimes go for 3 or 4 miles without seeing a single joint bar. Thank goodness for that. Even still, we are looking at thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of joint bars every day. There are 2 of us co-op students, so we take shifts. When I’m not working, I hole-punch and prepare reports that are constantly being printed out, I go grab a snack, sit and listen to the supervisors talk, or go stand inbetween the two cars and watch the scenery go by.

There is another job performed by the co-op students, the Deployable Gauge Restraint Measuring System, but it is currently under repairs, and we’ll be getting it back in a couple weeks. That job apparently consists of looking for switches or other obstacles in the track and pressing a button. Just as riveting as this job. So when we get that car then we’ll be working most of the time, and not much time for looking at the scenery L

We started this week in binghampton, and headed south to Sunbury, Pensylvania. We then retraced our tracks back to binghampton all the way to Montreal, were we parked for the weekend. This past week was full of ‘hurry up and wait’, where we would be scheduled to start at 7:00am, we’d get up and be ready to go only to find that they had cancelled our crew and rescheduled for 12 or something else. There was a track block, where a repair crew shuts down the track to do repairs, on one of the lines we were going to go on Thursday. And we should have been able to get by it before they shut the track down, but that would involve getting a crew on time and no delays during the day. And when we called Wednesday afternoon they were already talking about having us start later. So we said screw it and decided to start at 1:00am, get through the track block with almost no delays, and do Friday’s testing as well. It worked wonderfully, the crew arrived on time, we had almost no delays, and made it to montreal by 3:00pm. And we also get a long weekend out of it! As I have already visited montreal, I have decided to go visit my old stomping grounds in Ottawa, having lived there for 8 months for other co-op terms, and also visit 2 friends who are there on co-op, Sadie and Jenn.
I also saw my first big wildlife (birds don't count) - there were 2 small bear cubs we saw on the tracks ahead of us. They quickly scampered off into the forest though. 

Later!