Snow

Snow. What a love/hate relationship.

On one hand, it makes everything stunningly beautiful. I thought nothing could come close to northern Ontario during the peak of fall. But northern Ontario under a blanket of snow is also pretty spectacular.

The downside of snow is that it can really mess with the data. There’s a laser that shines on the rail, and a camera that picks up the profile of the laser on the rail. There are crosshairs that detect the top and the lip of the rail, and that’s where all the measurements are taken from. If there is snow all the way up to the head of the rail, then the camera picks up the laser shining on the snow, and the crosshairs don’t know what to do. 

Here is a typical stream of gauge measurement:

And this is the same stream when there’s a lot of snow:

The vertical axis is gauge distance, with 56.5 being the specified measurement. Depending on the class of track, anything above 58 inches could be an urgent defect. If you look at how many times the data goes above 58 inches in the bottom pic, there are a lot of urgent defects detected, none of which are valid. And that’s only over 580 feet (the bottom axis is distance in feet).

A typical subdivision (usually 130-180 miles) results in 600 or 700ish defects. A couple hundred is a good run, and anything over 1,400 or 1,500 is a bad run. These would be both urgents and priorities, with probably 95% being priorities, which no one really cares about as it’s not bad enough to worry about it. The first run that we did with significant snow, the system recorded 14,800 defects. At the end of that sub, the combined books for the track supervisors were literally over a foot high of paper. After that run we turned off a lot of the defects, and now we’re just measuring gauge and GRMS. So the books are manageable again.

The snow also clogs up the cameras, resulting in no image at all. We have a trigger near our stations that turns on an air compressor that blows air through hoses to the lenses of the cameras to clean it up, which works most of the time. The snow is also very annoying for the daily maintenance, cleaning the cameras/lasers, as well as changing the lube sticks for the deployable axle. The holes for the cameras are too small for gloves, which means bare hands have to be used a lot of the time. Ice can sometimes get stuck in the holes, so we have to use a screwdriver to scrape it off, while trying not to scratch the glass. And of course all the equipment is very close to the ground, and to clean some of them we have to get down on our backs to access the cameras, all in the cold snow. Luckily it hasn’t been too cold or too deep of snow yet, but apparently sometimes we have to get the shovels out.  

Yet even with all that trouble, the snow can still make things very pretty under the train, with cool icicles hanging from the lights. You just gotta find the positives in life J

Last week was travelling from Sudbury from Winnipeg. We were supposed to go to Brandon, but the engine died on Thursday, so we stayed in Winnipeg for repairs. The plan for next week is to go all the way to Kamloops, which means the rockies!