Odd photo of MW crew setting rail on fire

I give up....can someone tell me what this is?
http://photos.nerail.org/showpic/?photo ... bydate%3A2

heating rail to fix a pull apart.
they put a thick rope like thing saturated in kerosene next to rail and light it, the expansion of rail makes it easy to slip new bolts in railjoiners.

That won't light the ties up?

It could but the fire is in base of rail and goes over tie plates. so any small tie fires can be extinguished fairly easy.

And heat rises, so the ties stay much cooler than the rail above.

they put the "fire rope" on the rail itself or they put on the tie plates

TPR37777 wrote:I give up....can someone tell me what this is?
http://photos.nerail.org/showpic/?photo ... bydate%3A2

Hot???

I assume then that it was a very very cold day and that they were attempting to raise the temperature of the rail to achieve an acceptable neutral rail temperature? Is there a special process they use to "take" the temperature of the rail?

It always goes over awesome with the local fire department when they do this. As soon as people see the smoke and flame, they start calling 911. I'm a callman for Saco and a number of times, I've heard calls come in stating a 'large fire on the railroad tracks'. Every time it just ends up being MOW crews.

You should've seen when Guilford was running their last couple of U-18Bs!! Every now and then,they'd belch fire out the stack,and same thing,people would call about " a train being on fire". This happened a couple of times in the Brunswick yard in the mid 1990s,when they were interchanging cars with the Maine Coast. Fire Dept. didn't appreciate it! Bud

Would it be possible for the MOW guys to tell the fire department ahead of time that they will be doing this? That way if a report came in they could phone or perhaps radio the MOW dept and see if there was actually a fire when the report comes in.

Obviously this wouldn't be an option with the locos that occasionally burp up flames, which someday i hope to see, but thats a different story.

joshuahouse wrote:Would it be possible for the MOW guys to tell the fire department ahead of time that they will be doing this?

Sure it would be possible, but the MOW guys probably feel that it's "not their job" to do that, and the railroad management guys probably feel that it's not their job either, and/or they just don't want to bother.

MEC407 wrote:

joshuahouse wrote:Would it be possible for the MOW guys to tell the fire department ahead of time that they will be doing this?

Sure it would be possible, but the MOW guys probably feel that it's "not their job" to do that, and the railroad management guys probably feel that it's not their job either, and/or they just don't want to bother.

Any time we light up the rope the local FD is notified.

At least some people do it, good.

as a fire dispatcher... most FDs would check out the location... in the event of a missed phone call saying the work was done. No dispatcher would want to chance a brush fire if the MOW work was done and no one called back. It isn't a big deal to check it out. Fire alarm companies servicing sprinklers and alarms are always forgetting to notify us when they do work.