Rare Treat!

[gtrtroger]

I'm sitting here a work looking out the window. Across the parking lot and a fence is a CSX brachline. Normally this line hosts daily hopper deliveries to a local plastics company. No big deal.
Today however, I'm being treated to a parade of 8-10 little CSX track MoW vehicles doing railroad tie replacements. What a great little ballet......

I keep thinking how great I'd be to have these and many other MoW vehicles operating in TS. I routine add HyRails to the routes I create or modify. It's a blast to run the rails that way, explore the routes, and occasionally get blasted by an AI thru-freight I forgot about.....LOL!

[Ericmopar]

Yes, the coordination of an operation like that is truly hypnotic.

I once got to watch U.P. do a total track replacement in Hayward Ca a few years back. The total length of the replacement crew was over a mile.
They had tie removal units, tie replacement units, a ballast washer, ballast spreader, then rail removal, welding and replacement, gauging and then spiking machines. Then a ballast tamper.
They were replacing the tie plates by hand still.
At the very end of all that, was an old man with a broom fine tuning the ballast and sweeping debris off the rail head.
In hind sight, I'm surprised they weren't using panel track.