I have 1.2 miles of Railroad track to remove on a china factory demolition. i searched the site because i thought this was discussed but came up empty. i was planning on using my hitachi 160 with a 24'' bucket with a hole cut out in the back of the bucket. i planned on sliding the track thru the bucket and kind of prying on it like the claw of a hammer. the track is 20' lenghts. Any other methods or suggestion would be great!
why not just straddle track and use cutting edge?
Dont cut your bucket, its not hard to pry loose from the ties at all. More important is how do you plan to seperate the joints? Cut with torches unbolt? Also do you have to remove the plates from the ties? And also remove the ties? How do you plan to then load the rail and the OTM (other track material)? Pay close attention to all of it as RR scrap pays great money. But above all what ever you do dont try to fold and break the rails, as they are very brittle, and will not fold, and often will snap in pieces sending a piece or 2 flying like a projectile, often right towards the machine. very dangerous. Good luck.
Track parallel to the, umm, tracks with a small enough bucket to fit between the ties and pry up both rails as you go along. Prying on on end will create a lot of defection. This could cause catastrophic breakage of the rail and one hell of an energy release. This is the second time this week i wanted a nuke or MOAB gif. Oh well, this will have to do.
i heard an old timer tell me he would use apiece of heavy guage pipe with a chain thru it . he said get the pipe under it and thread in chain and pull ! i havent tried it . just some b.s. i heard . always worth a try i guess if all else fails !
yeah this is what i would do if its in 20ft lengths....
Most of the track is running through old alleys and roads with not many ties left. that is why i was thinking if i could get the track to go through the bucket i could always make sure i had an edge pulled up for after we burn off the joint so i dont have to go digging in the road again. sometimes my plans work out like they do in my head!
I should of paid more attention to when they removed miles of tracks around here. I think they had a carriage on tracks and started the track over it and just pulled the carriage down the track. It lifted it up pulling the spikes and the track laid loose behind it. Anything that would start it up slowly that you could pull should lift the rails straight up. I do know that rails are brittle and shatter from a sharp enough blow. Good luck!
I think this might be what you were thinking of... http://forum.bauforum24.biz/forum/uploads/post-5-1101570321_thumb.jpg
I can tell ddigger has done this before. I cleaned up a small switch yard a few years ago and everything he said i ran into. I pulled most of the rail by hooking the outside tooth of the bucket on my 953 under the top flange and driving parallel to the track. It does come loose easy. The trick is getting the 20' sections to break. Some times they break easy, sometimes with a huge bang and sometimes not at all, you just plain chicken out. The taller the rail the harder the joints break. Plan on torch work and hand labor to get the cover plates.
I did some a while back, remove and replace, and we used a track grapple attached to the picking eye on the back of the bucket. Then used the bottom of the bucket as a heel of sorts to pry up on the rail. Once you get the first spikes moving, the rail jsut flew off the ties! Swung the old rail outta the way, grabbed the new and put it right back into place. Worked pretty slick.