Imagine the task of standardizing the maintenance of thousands of miles of individual bolted rails across Canada. That was just one of the goals of this book of rules and instructions. Standard new rails were 39 feet long in 1939, however the book also prescribed expansion gaps for older 33 foot rail. A couple of decades earlier, the CNR had inherited the lines, equipment and employees of many different railways.
In most cases in 1939, railway lines in Canada were maintained by section gangs whose sections (patrol areas) were numbered, beginning from Mile 0.0 of a subdivision. The section gang was supervised by a section foreman. Section foremen reported to the roadmaster. In this book, by rule, the section foreman was personally to travel over his section twice per week.
It is reasonable to conclude that most transportation for section gangs during this era was provided by muscle power applied to a hand car. Rules are provided for motor cars, but gas-powered speeders were probably not common until after World War 2 - particularly on Canada's thousands of miles of secondary lines and branches.
The pages below first deal with the specific identification of rails (eg. recording which manufacturer, date, lot, etc) when defects were found. Obviously, one could not dump all the examples of a bad batch of rails on the roadmaster's desk, so he could send them to headquarters, so accounting could demand compensation. There had to be a reliable system on paper - particularly to allow headquarters to identify when many defects were developing in a particular batch, for the sake of safety.
The next group of pages is particularly interesting as it has many photographs showing what the various defects looked like. Back in the days when Canada's steel industry was populated by 'bounty hunters' (the nickname given to companies cashing in on generous government subsidies to promote domestic steel production) steel metallurgy was less sophisticated and all kinds of interesting defects occurred in rails. Early diagnostic pre-failure features and actual failure classifications are illustrated by photos and diagrams.
Unique to the period of steam locomotive operation is the extensive rail damage which could be done by poorly-balanced steam locomotive driving wheels (i.e. a shop maintenance error) or unauthorized over-speed operation of a given type. The safety risk to workers associated with unspiking this type of damaged rail is also interesting to consider.
... In the late 1950s, with the regular transport of dead steam locomotives, driving rods removed, in trains, to scrapping centres ... there were extensive cautions and restrictive speed limits published in employee timetables to govern these movements of locomotives with unbalanced driving wheels.
Back to 1939: If you were wondering ... Dr Elmer A Sperry had been contracting his company's unique rail defect detecting services to some American railroads for around a decade. However, there is no mention of rail defect detector cars in this book.
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This particular book was addressed for pickup by either our father, or Eric, or me, as a gift from our photo finisher of long standing - 30 years ago. By the early 1990s, it was quite apparent to him that an old book from his former employer would be of interest to people who took such an awful lot of train photographs ... including photos of the markings on the sides of rails !
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