"Railway Maintenance"

Here's a book that I would highly recommend to anyone that is interested in the details involved with maintaining railroad [track] infrastructure.

"Railway Maintenance -
The Men and Machines that keep the Railroads Running"
By Brian Solomon
2001, MBI Publishing Company
ISBN 0-7603-0975-2

On this link you can see the table of contents, index, and a few pages of text:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0760309 ... eader-page

I found the book to be excellent.

As far as I know, and from what I can see on Amazon.com, it is the only publicly available modern-day book on this topic. (If I'm wrong on this point please let me know).

i gotten that book also and highly recomened it too. it has great pictures and facs and has a fairly good price

there is also a good video called worken on the railroad by Pentrex video that shows Wood tie replacemt, dispacting operations, car building, and concrete tie replacemnt. Its good flick about 2 hours long.

Thanks for the information about the book and videos. I haven't heard of any maintenance on the freight lines around Washington D.C.. I have seen work done on MetroRail's subway system. MetroRail's maintenance train is interesting to look at. It's also loud.

I have seen red and green cones on the train tracks when Metro was single-tracking a section of the railroad.

Metro uses orange cones to place in the center of the out of service track. And Red and Green flags to restrict and notify train operators track crews are working ahead on the same track they are operating on......