Track E-Book

Jim Pike

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

The permanent way is a principal feature of all railways, but is little explored. Jim Pike's illustrated history fills this gap in railway literature. He investigates the origins and evolution of track from the earliest wooden rails to the welded steel used today. He looks at engineering developments, at methods of manufacture, and at successful innovations over the last 200 years. This account is full of fascinating insights into this important but neglected topic. It is written in an engaging, non-technical style, and will be illuminating reading and reference for anyone who loves railways and is intrigued by their history.

Leseprobe

TRACK

JIM PIKE

To my wife Patricia, who has been a constant source of encouragement and help. This book is hers as much as it is mine.

First published in 2001

This edition published in 2010

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Jim Pike, 2001, 2010, 2013

The right of Jim Pike to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUBISBN 978 0 7509 5144 9

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Introduction

ONE

Early Railways

TWO

Edge Rails of Iron and Steel

THREE

Some Other Systems and Oddities

FOUR

Points and Crossings

FIVE

Sleepers and Fastenings

SIX

Along the track

SEVEN

Civil Engineering

EIGHT

Electrified Track

NINE

Temporary Track

TEN

Tools of the Trade

ELEVEN

A Miscellany

TWELVE

Accidents

THIRTEEN

Tramway Track

FOURTEEN

‘Track of Old Railway’

Acknowledgements

Suggestions for Further Reading

Fig. 1. Straight and true. The former Midland main line to Scotland, near Keighley, 2000. (Author)

INTRODUCTION

The aim of this book is to give the interested lay person an idea of the history and development of railway track. It will not make the reader an instant civil engineer, but hopefully it will answer some of the questions that an enquiring mind may ask. It is difficult to start with the first ‘railway’. How far back can one go? Wooden railways, using manpower for traction, were to be found in medieval mines. Much erudite ink has been expended, in the columns of The Railway Magazine and elsewhere, in tracing the use of guided ways for wheels back to Ancient Rome, and of guided sledges to Ancient Babylon. Such researches are usually focused on the question of the origin of the standard gauge of 4ft 8½in. The author feels that such investigations, fascinating though they undoubtedly are, are not relevant to the task in hand, and he is content to settle for the horse-operated wooden railway as a starting point.

Since track is part and parcel of the railways’ infrastructure, some space in the pages that follow is devoted to civil engineering: cuttings, embankments, bridges and tunnels. The early railway builders found that they had some novel problems to solve, and they adopted a variety of methods of approach. Not all were successful, and some structures have been replaced. But the best still stand as a memorial, not only to the vision and imagination of the engineers, but to the wielders of pick and shovel who transformed the engineers’ plans and drawings into reality.

The track had to adapt with the introduction of steam locomotives, and again as the latter became heavier and train speeds became higher. A certain amount of movement under a passing train is desirable to give an easier ride, but not movement sufficient to displace the track and cause the derailment of a following train. Ballast consisting of crushed granite proved superior to shingle from beaches, although the latter was available in limitless quantities without charge. The bull-head rail has now given way to the flat-bottomed rail, and rail sections have increased in size over the years to carry heavier loads. The wooden sleeper is only now giving way to a concrete equivalent, and welded rails have removed the once familiar ‘duddety-dun’ of the rail joints. Electric traction has arrived, and the track has had to adapt accordingly.

My attitude to electrification of track has been somewhat ambivalent. since third and fourth rail electrification directly affects the track, in particular its sleepers, I have tried to cover it in this book. But, since the overhead wires which are suspended from overhead gantries do not directly affect the track, I have, somewhat reluctantly and for reasons of space, had to omit them.

Your author’s wife, when a volunteer worker on the Talyllyn Railway, well remembers the lady who asked her if there was a Woolworth’s at Nant Gwernol!

A variety of signs have been erected beside railway tracks for the information of train crews and others, and some of these are mentioned, but I have deliberately ignored signalling. Not only would it unbalance the book, but several excellent works, covering the subject with varying degrees of technicality, are already available.

Light and narrow gauge railways scarcely need a separate mention: they have used the same concept of trackwork, merely scaled down by the use of a lighter rail section and, in the case of narrow gauge lines, shorter sleepers. In these days of steam railway preservation, the Talyllyn Railway in Wales adopted the practice of purchasing second-hand sleepers from British Railways and simply cutting them in half; other lines have probably done the same. It is, perhaps, worth spending a few words on trying to define the term ‘light railway’. This is difficult, because in defining the term the Light Railways Act also uses the expression; this is tantamount to saying that a light railway is a light railway! In practice, it means that a railway built and/or operated under the provisions of the Act is limited to a maximum speed of 25mph, and main line signalling standards do not apply. The result is that today it is possible to see lines like the Keighley & Worth Valley Light Railway (to give it its full title) operating trains with the biggest main line steam locomotives!

But in their heyday, from about 1890 to the 1930s, light railways generally were rural concerns working on a shoestring. Permanent way consisted of a single track of lightweight flat-bottomed rail spiked directly to the sleepers, and earth or gravel ballast. Weed control was negligible or non-existent, and the same could be said for maintenance. Train speeds were very low: anything faster than about 20mph would precipitate derailment. Such lines were easy prey for the motor bus and lorry. The survivors have turned to the leisure market, offering a ‘steam train’ experience. The goods trains carrying agricultural produce, once so typical of lines such as the Welshpool & Llanfair and the Kent & East Sussex, are now but a distant memory – or a photographers’ special. The preserved lines maintain their track to a vastly higher standard than the old-time ‘light railway’. Heavier rails with more sophisticated fastenings, ex-British Rail spent (and cleaned) crushed granite ballast, oiled and well-adjusted rail joints, all betoken a keen awareness of safety criteria. They are also a sign of the financial resources of a supporters’ club such as pre-war light railway managements could only envisage in their wildest dreams. The down side is that many preserved lines are truncated. The West Somerset runs from Minehead to Bishops Lideard and does not (yet) reach Taunton; the Yorkshire Dales Railway runs from Embsay to Bolton Abbey, and does not (yet) reach Skipton. Even the Talyllyn runs from Tywyn to Nant Gwernol, a point on the map well suited to the rambler and offering beautiful views but not much else to other passengers. It has been said of such lines that they run from Somewhere to the Middle of Nowhere. For the passengers of such lines, it is much better to travel hopefully than to arrive!

ONE

EARLY RAILWAYS

The origins of trackwork are, obviously, the origins of railways. Just what constitutes a railway needs to be addressed: it is here taken as a prepared way of rails to accommodate specially adapted rolling stock. The rails can be of any section (most sections, likely and unlikely, have been tried at one time or another) and the wheels can be flanged or plain. The invention of the wheel is shrouded in antiquity, but it does not take much imagination to devise a way of making a wheeled vehicle follow a pre-set path. The main application of a self-steering system was in conditions of total darkness where a man could not see to steer a truck. Such conditions existed underground, in mines.

The first railways of which there are definite records were the mining tramways of the sixteenth century, as described and illustrated by Agricola. It was quickly realised that a truck of coal running on flat wooden planks was much easier to push than one running on the rocky floor of a mine gallery. It was, however, soon found that if the truck were to be pushed along in total darkness, then some means was needed to hold it on course. The system devised consisted of arranging planks on the floor with a gap of about 6in between them, and fixing a vertical pin on the front of the trucks to engage in this gap. The truck was called a hund by the German miners, and the pin was termed a leitnagel. This system is shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2. This hand-propelled truck has plain roller-type wheels, which are kept on the board ‘rails’ by the pin projecting down between them. In a mine this truck would keep to the track even when pushed along in total darkness. (Demonstration replica at the National Railway Museum, York) (Author)

Fig. 3. An example of wooden track preserved at the National Railway Museum, York. (Author)

Above ground, wooden rails were popular. The name ‘rail’ comes from rail-and-post fencing, which can still be seen in places. Wooden rails were cheap and easy to lay, repair and renew; they were soon very popular. They did, however, have one drawback: they wore out quickly. So the custom soon became widespread of laying a second, renewable, strip on the top of the ‘permanent’ rail. Where these strips were made of iron, they were known as ‘plates’ and the men who looked after them became known as ‘platelayers’ – a term still in use.

Wooden rails were often used in conjunction with wooden wheels; cast-iron wheels wore the rails out even faster. But wooden wheels tended to slip on the rails in wet weather, which made braking difficult. Slipping on wet rails is a problem also faced by modern railways.

There was once an extensive system of wooden railways in the North-East, all conveying coal from the mines to the rivers Tyne, Tees and Wear. Here the coal was loaded onto ships, either for export or for the coastal trade, principally to London. Traction on these railways was supplied by horses. All these routes were eventually relaid with iron rails, either as plateways or as edge railways, and many have been repeatedly upgraded to become main line railways.

The distance between the rails, or the track gauge, differed. In the North-East it varied between 4ft 6in and 5ft, while in Shropshire at Ironbridge in the Severn Gorge it was around 3ft. The two areas developed independently of each other, and the reasons for the two sizes are largely historical: a wooden ‘chaldron’* wagon in the North-East made a full load for a single horse, while in Shropshire it was usual for a horse to pull two or three trucks. In the North-East, the general lie of the railways was downhill, from the pits to the staithes on the river banks where the coal was loaded into ships for export. Wagons were fitted with good brakes, but these were sometimes insufficient when wooden or cast-iron wheels slipped on wet wooden rails.

Some means had to be found of keeping wheels on the plain, rectangular rails (see Fig. 3). A flange was added to the wheel. Projecting below the level of the rail top, it stopped the wheel from slipping off in one direction, and a flange on the opposite side kept it from slipping off in the other. This pre-supposed, of course, that the wheels could not slide along their axles.

Generally flanges are on the inside of the wheels, but there have been one or two isolated lines where they were on the outside. Only slightly more common was the line with flanges on both sides of the wheels. This was to accommodate simply appalling track which kept to gauge plus or minus several inches! The Nantlle Railway in North Wales was one such. Here, the track gauge was nominally 3ft 6in, but the wheels could slide along their axles to take up variations in gauge. The Nantlle was horse-operated, and lasted long enough to be closed by British Railways in the 1950s.

So far, we have considered plain rails carrying flanged wheels. A rival system developed, whereby plain wheels ran on L-shaped rails. The perceived advantage was that wagons with plain wheels could also run on the public roads. This was not really true, because the wheels were necessarily of narrow tread – about 1in – and they soon bogged down in the unmetalled roads of the times. Turnpike road operators soon laid down a minimum tread width to avoid damage to their roads’ surfaces. The narrow wheel rims are clearly shown in Fig. 6.

Pointwork presented no problem, apart from arranging that the rails did not trip up the horses pulling the wagons. The drawback to plateways was that the L-shaped rails, or plates, soon became clogged with dirt and rubbish. This did not fall off, but collected in the angle of the plates and resulted in wagons getting a very rough passage. It also reduced the hauling capacity of the horses that supplied the motive power. However, if a handful of dirt is dropped onto a modern rail, most of it will fall off. What remains will move when the rail vibrates at the approach of a train.

Fig. 6. Plateway track displayed at the National Railway Museum, York. It will be seen that the rails are quite short, with the joints supported in a cast-iron ‘chair’. (Author)

Many years ago now, your author and his wife found themselves in Merthyr Tydfil, and took the opportunity to visit the most famous plateway of them all, namely the Penydarren Tramway. It was here that Richard Trevithick demonstrated what has often been claimed to be the world’s first steam railway locomotive in March 1804. We found the course of the line well preserved in places, with many stone sleeper blocks still in situ. And here was a historical conundrum: the sleepers suggested that the rails had been 4ft 8in or 4ft 9in apart. Yet the well-known drawing of the Penydarren locomotive has the wheels only 3ft apart. This led to further research, and your author is now convinced that the drawing, usually referred to as the Llewellyn Drawing and now in the Science Museum at South Kensington, does not show the 1804 Penydarren locomotive. He believes that it shows something even older, which almost certainly operated on the 3ft gauge internal tramways of the Penydarren Ironworks itself in 1802 or 1803.

Curves were a potential problem. It is possible to bend a I-section rail to a continuous curve, but not so L-section ones. Curves were built up by a series of tangents, which meant that rails were limited to 3ft to 6ft lengths. The rough, jarring motion when traversing a curve was no problem when traffic moved at the speed of a horse led by a man, namely walking pace, but anything faster would have been unacceptable. This, and the inability of cast iron to support a heavy load, goes a long way to explain the general lack of success of steam locomotives on plateways. Indeed, several plateways that tried locomotives found that breakages were so frequent that they reverted to horse traction.

Plateways had a good innings. The last one, in the Forest of Dean, closed in 1944, but a demonstration plateway has been assembled at Blists Hill Open Air Museum, Coalbrookdale. This not only displays pointwork, but also includes some rolling stock – including that rarest of items, a plateway tank wagon.

* The ‘chaldron’, incidentally, was a measure of weight. In 1616 it stood at about 43cwt, and it was fixed by statute in 1678 at 52½cwt. In 1695 it became 53cwt and remained so. By the second half of the eighteenth century the expression ‘chaldron wagon’ appeared, soon abbreviated to ‘chaldron’, which became synonymous with ‘wagon’.

TWO

EDGE RAILS OF IRON AND STEEL

Cast-iron rails were cheap to make. Usually in 6ft lengths, they were laid on separate stone sleeper blocks to leave a clear path down the centre of the track for the horses that provided traction. The Silkstone tramway in South Yorkshire was unusual in that its sleeper blocks were laid in a diamond form, rather than the usual rectangular layout. The cross-section of the rails could be almost anything – T-section, T-section, I-section, plain rectangular were all tried.

The Vale of Belvoir Railway track, illustrated in Fig. 8, shows an unusual form of interlocked joint between rails. This was ingenious, but it was soon found that odd gaps had to be filled with short stretches of rail. The interlocked system was simply not suitable for joining to plain-cut pieces of rail and so did not become commtonplace.

Cast iron is strong in compression but brittle in tension. Between sleeper blocks, where it was unsupported, it was strong enough to support the horse-drawn wagons but not the pioneer steam locomotives, which weighed 3 or 4 tons and had an axle-load of between 1 and2 tons. The more expensive wrought iron was tried and found to be far less prone to breaking. In 1820 John Birkenshaw of the Bedlington Ironworks in Northumberland produced a T-section rail with a ‘fish-bellied’ cross-section in malleable iron. The fish-bellied section, first used in the cast-iron rails of William Jessop, was produced by a system of cams operating rolls. The first type produced was of 17lb/yard, but the Stockton & Darlington Railway, opened in 1825, used 28lb/yard, later increased to 35lb/yard. These rails were secured in the chairs with iron pins, rather after the fashion of Fig. 9. It is said that by 1837 parallel rails of 50lb/yard were in use, and 64lb/yard by 1842. These were used with iron chairs and secured by wedges. By 1841 Bolckow & Vaughan’s Middlesbrough Iron Works was rolling rails of 73lb/yard for the Great North of England Railway. Stone sleeper blocks were used which were drilled with two holes, plugged with hammered in oak pins; the chairs were spiked to the oak. Wrought-iron rails with a square section had been used elsewhere for several years before Birkenshaw developed his fish-bellied section, but they were inferior to the Birkenshaw product.

Fig. 8. Cast-iron rails from the Vale of Belvoir Railway, which opened in 1815. Note that the rails are shaped so that they interlock with each other. (Author)

Fig. 9. An example of T-section rail at the National Railway Museum. Note the method of securing the rail to the ‘chairs’, and the rough-hewn sleepers. (Author)

Fig. 10. Malleable fish-bellied rail in longer lengths than between the stone sleepers. (Author)

Another attempt to combine a steam locomotive with brittle cast-iron rails involved putting the locomotive on more than four wheels. This was tried by William Hedley (1779–1843) at Wylam, and produced the world’s first eight-wheeled locomotive – also the first articulated locomotive. It was mounted on two four-wheeled trucks or bogies and all wheels were driven by gearing. But it was ahead of its time: keeping the complicated machinery in order was quite an assignment, and the locomotive spent more time under repair than in service. It was converted back to a four-wheeler.

Stone sleeper blocks, while adequate for horse-drawn traffic, soon proved unsuitable for locomotives. they were used on the Stockton & Darlington Railway, but as soon as horse traction for passenger services was abandoned, the line was relaid with wooden sleepers. The reason for this is not hard to deduce: the sideways thrusts of a locomotive’s wheels tended to force the blocks out of gauge, and one rail tended to subside more than the other. So wooden sleepers were adopted, and the rails could be fastened down to something that could be relied upon to hold the gauge.

The next step was the adoption of a dumbbell-section rail, with the two heads identical. This ‘double-headed’ rail was mounted in cast-iron supports, termed ‘chairs’, and wedged in place with wooden wedges or ‘keys’. When one head became worn, the whole rail could be turned upside-down and the other head used for traffic. It was an ingenious idea, but it failed because the chairs left definite imprints on the underside of the rail, thus making it useless for running. It was replaced by a rail, still dumbbell-shaped in section, but with the top half appreciably larger than the bottom, which was secured in chairs as before. This was termed a ‘bull-head’ rail, and it can still be seen in service today.