The Lynchburg Crossings

The past few weeks have been a bit boring, we have been doing little tasks getting ready to cut in our two crossings and retrieving our finally fixed truck.  This week we finally got everything lined up and got both crossings cut in, but of course there has to be a little bit of drama.

7th St. Crossing

The first thing you have to do when cutting in a new crossing, is disable the old crossing.  While we get all of the new things in place all trains that come to the crossing must stop and flag the crossing.  This makes everything safe for the public and the trains.  Lynchburg is double track, but we rarely see two trains at the same time at the same crossing.  That is of course, unless I am cutting in a crossing.

Engineer Allen Dial on engine 603 and Engineer Mark Bishop on engine 5304 meet at 7th St. in Lynchburg.  Conductor Jeremy Mooney flags the north side of the crossing.

These two trains met at our crossing just as we were getting started, and there were a few more in line behind them.  The train behind engine 5304 was around 12 thousand feet long (that's over 2 miles long!) so he took a few minutes to get out of the way.  We had trucks backed up for a half a mile trying to get into and out of the steel plant.

It is very hard to work on the tracks with engines in the way, but we successfully got this one done by about 1500.  Of course after we get it turned on, we need to see trains go across it, but as luck would have it, all the trains were in the way when we didn't need them, and none when we needed them. We had to send another crew down to the crossing the next day to watch trains.

Concord Turnpike

Concord turnpike bears no resemblance to an actual turnpike, it is just a little two lane road, right in front of the yard office in Lynchburg.  This little crossing has some traffic, but it wasn't the traffic that made this crossing exciting  In addition to cutting in the crossing and all of the hoopla that goes with that, the power company also decided that they would be turning the power off and replacing the lines that run across the track.  So it was my job to protect train crews, signalmen, the power company and the public.  Honestly I love to be busy, but things like this make me feel like I am running in 4 different directions.  

Appalachian power workers move power lines from the old pole to the new pole

When the power company cut the power off, it also disrupted the dispatchers radio, so we could hear him calling us, but he couldn't hear us answering.  That means phone only communication, which takes much longer than the radio.  Just another little detail to be managed.  So now we have the Q303 and the Q302 trying to switch at the same time, power outages causing problems for the dispatcher's radio and the printers inside the building, everyone has to stop and flag the crossing, we are trying to cut in the crossing and the power company is begging for time to get the new lines up across the tracks.  It was a bit of a crazy day.  

Just to add to the chaos, the city decided it was an excellent day to practice water rescues in the James River, so there was a low flying helicopter dropping and picking things up in the river. It was truly a day of planes, trains and automobiles.  

I am happy to report that all the work was completed correctly and safely, and we all went home with all of our fingers and toes.  Next half we have a few odds and ends to finish up, and then we will be heading to Newport News for our next job.  I wonder what interesting things will happen down there.

For those of you that were interested in the history post, I am working on another history post and hope to have it up next week.  

A helicopter hovers over the river as the power company works on the new lines and we work on the new crossing

Some Assembly Required

"You know like an erector set or a box of Legos"

"So you are telling me you get paid to play with Legos?"

"Yea basically"



Two flood platform pieces and the stairs

This was a portion of a conversation I had with my teenaged son this week trying to explain to him the flood platforms we were putting together.  Now I will try and explain it to you.  A flood platform is just what it sounds like, a platform to keep our crossing house up off the ground in case of flooding.  It sits about 9' in the air and it does not come all in one piece.  You get a kit that pretty much resembles the adult version of an erector set, a box of bolts and washers and a bunch of different pieces for you to fit together.  It also comes with a vague set of directions that if followed will not get you quite where you need to go. 

The discussion

The platform itself comes in 2 pieces, there are uprights, cross supports, foundation screws and so on and it will go together as described in the directions, the rub comes when you try to set the house on the platform and run cable into it.  If you put the house on the platform as intended, you can not open the front door all the way, nor can you run the cable straight up into the house because there are I-beams and cross members in the way. So we had to get a little creative, slide the house back, cut the grating and rig up 4 aluminum pipes so the cables are not swaying in the breeze. 

So yea I pretty much get paid to play with the big kid version of Legos. 

You can't have a week on the railroad without seeing something strange and this week was no exception.  It was goat week this week here at CSX, it's kind of like shark week, only less teeth.  While setting some 707 boards in Lynchburg yard we ran across a family of goats just wandering down the tracks, Mama, Pappa and a few kids takin a stroll through the yard.  Papa was pretty friendly so we fed him some crackers and then shooed them off the tracks.  That same evening we pulled the boom truck into the hotel parking lot just as a girl came out of a room to get into a Jeep Rubicon.  She was carrying a red bundle all swaddled up like a furry baby.  I looked closer trying to figure out what kind of critter it was and of course, it was a goat.   I know goats are cool and all, but swaddling one up and traveling with it seemed a bit odd to me.