To build a light rail system, you need rail. Starting tonight, March 28, 2024, that rail will begin to be delivered to the Purple Line construction site off of Montgomery Avenue in downtown Bethesda. Between the hours of 7:00 PM and 5:00 AM, trucks will haul standard gauge rail to the site. It will be unloaded from the trucks during the night. However, actual installation of the rail onto the trackbed will take place during daytime hours. Rail deliveries into downtown Bethesda will continue for about four weeks, the Maryland Transit Administration said in an announcement yesterday.
It has to be intentional. 4 weeks to deliver rail, all at night to annoy the residents. Why wouldn't they lay the rail in front of them as they proceed down the line, like a normal railroad would? Pick up the sleepers from a flat car behind you with the crane, lay them down, same with the rails. Back in 1860, they would be doing one set of rails a minute or so, all by hand. One day they did 8 miles of track. All by hand.
ReplyDelete"Why wouldn't they lay the rail in front of them as they proceed down the line, like a normal railroad would?"
ReplyDeleteYou're literally commenting on an article about rail being delivered and staged at one end of the line so they can do exactly that, Einstein.
Thanks for the update
ReplyDelete12:41, Please read carefully, I will write more slowly. When laying track, usually a crane would be on the first car or flatbed on the rails, and sleepers and rails, fishplates, etc., would be on flatbeds loaded behind that car, all on the rails they are laying as they go. The crane rotates around, picks up the rails, rotates forward, lays the rails, then they proceed.
ReplyDeleteDid they make the rails on the flat bed as well?
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