AB0YY QSO Thursday, Sept. 25, 2003 18.140 MHZ

I just received this by email from AB0YY. I thought I'd share it with all of you.

Some pictures I took of Burlington Northern Santa Fe's track geometry car 85 and support car 86.

Car 85 is a 1926 Pullman, originally Santa Fe's buisness car No. 39. Converted to a track geometry test car in 1974. The car is the only black steel heavy weight left in the buisness car fleet. Notice it has 3 wheel trucks, not seen anymore. If you can see mounted on the front of the rear trucks is a box with 4- 2watt lasers, 4-CCD cameras and a fiber optic gyro system. We can test up to 70mph. During testing, we monitor 8 realtime computers and 10 monitors. When a track defect is found, the computer triggers a paint valve which sprays red paint between the rails. Maintenace crews are contacted, find the paint and pace off 280 back to the defect found by the system and repaired. Items the car checks for - wide gage, twist, warp, dip, excess elevation in a curve, tangent cross level, alignment, surface of each rail, rail wear, gage face wear, rail cant. Example, Class 5 track, freight speed max 79mph and passenger max 90mph, if you find on straight track an alignment of more than 3/4", this is an FRA defect and has to be either slow ordered to 10mph or repaired within 24 hours.

Hope to work you guys on the band when I get back on the road the 14th of this month.

73's
Ron

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