Creating something great requires a great amount of effort. In the same vein, making sure it stays great also needs you to be at your proficient best. However, maintenance is something that doesn’t receive as much recognition as it should. One such area, where we often forget how important role maintenance plays, is railway track maintenance.
Replacing railway tracks is crucial to the smooth functioning of various trains that run every day. Just like everything else, over time, tracks wear out and become faulty due to persistent usage. These defective tracks can be the culprit for inconvenient rides, and in the worst-case scenario, grave accidents. Therefore, railway track maintenance is a key task that carries immense importance.
For those who prefer watching track maintenance practices instead of reading about them, here’s a video that will engross you for the next few minutes.
How are railway tracks replaced?
As you may have guessed, railway track maintenance is no walk in the park and requires an entire crew’s dedication. It involves multiple repairmen, special suits, ad-hoc equipment, and industrial vehicles.
Maintenance work can usually take about a dozen crewmen and a maintenance crane. Coming to the process, the crewmen disconnect the old tracks from the railway and an operator lifts them off by a crane. Next, the crew covers the newly formed empty spaces with pre-assembled tracks and bolts them with the railway using special machines.
In many cases, pre-assembled tracks aren’t available and the crew needs to manually build the new parts of the track piece by piece. Fortunately, specialized machines exist that make the task of laying down new track parts from scratch convenient.
Now that you know this, the next time you enjoy a smooth train ride, take note for a moment of the hard work that goes into fixing different tracks every day.
