Let's get right down to it and address the big yellow machine sitting on the rails of Highway 48, Kipling North side. It doesn't look like your average long-distance locomotive or passenger train, in fact it is quite the sight to behold! The Loram Rail Grinder is a unique machine that serves to maintain and repair train tracks, improving train travel and prevention of derailment.
Railroads prioritize safety of the train systems and the people that operate them, therefore the rails that they operate on need the same amount of investment and care. “Railroads heavily invest in rail management programs to extend the life of rail and managers deploy exhaustive efforts to ensure rail health is attained while also meeting the various regulatory compliance needs,” Collette Caskey of Loram Marketing states. “Rail grinding is a proactive maintenance procedure to improve the wheel / rail interface. With rail being the single most valuable asset of a rail system, enhancing its reliability and extending its usable life is paramount to a railroad's success.”
Railroad tracks are inspected with careful examination to preserve and repair the state of condition needed for trains to continue the use of these existing tracks. “Loram in partnership with the railroads offers their equipment and services to maintain the rail,” adds Caskey. “Based on pre-inspection of the railroad, various areas of the track are targeted to be ground by one of Loram's Rail Grinders. By grinding the rail, the rail is put back into the correct profile to match up with the wheels of locomotives and train cars.”
Without the technologies provided by the Loram Rail Grinder, many of the rails that have been of use in the past would not likely be functional for the use of today's travelling locomotives. “This eliminates the need for the railroad to enforce slow orders for trains, hunting by locomotives to find the best running surface and eliminating a host of rail defects that ultimately could cause a derailment,” Caskey says of the importance of the Loram Rail Grinder repair.
If the application of repair and preservation isn't enough of a wow factor, the computer science behind the procedure should impress most people interested in the maintenance of Canada's historical railway. “Rail grinders are computer controlled and store a huge amount of data so that the precise pattern is applied to the specific location called out in the pre-inspection,” adds Caskey. “Our equipment incorporates dust control systems and flame resistant hydraulic fluid. All grinders are equipped with spark guards to retain grinding sparks within the confines of the track structure and also
carry ample water that is mixed with a foam surfactant.”
The Kipling community members have been used to seeing several train systems passing through day by day but this was certainly a head-turner to see this big machine apply their services in the area. Kipling has been fortunate to see the advancement and technologies that have changed the appearance and functions of locomotives since the earliest steam engines, this too being a major part of Canada's train history.
