Working on the railroad; replacing cross ties

If you travel the Broken Arrow Expressway you've seen the railroad ties stacked up beside the tracks. <br><br>We found out that Union Pacific is replacing some old cross ties. So, the News on 6's

Monday, April 19th 2004, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

If you travel the Broken Arrow Expressway you've seen the railroad ties stacked up beside the tracks.

We found out that Union Pacific is replacing some old cross ties. So, the News on 6's Rick Wells braved the traffic to see how they do it.

The 12 man crew of Union Pacific track maintenance workers is putting in new cross ties under the track. Richard Pettit with Union Pacific: "We're replacing selected ties." This crew started a couple of months ago in Porter; they'll finish this project sometime next week in downtown Tulsa where the Union Pacific line joins the Burlington Northern line.

Pettit: "When we leave here we're going to Muskogee, then after that we're going up to Wichita." A crew like this could be working from Little Rock down to the Red River, out to New Mexico and up into Kansas, .where ever the job takes them.

Pettit: "On average we'll put in 350 ties a day." There are 7 pieces of equipment to help them do that. There are a couple of machines way out front that pull the spikes out of the damaged cross tie. That machine is an extractor, it uses these big teeth to latch onto and pull the damaged tie out. Further down the track is a similar machine that pushes the new tie into place. The track lifter picks up the section of track so the crew can place the tie plate. The spiker brings up the rear.

In the old days much of this work would have had to be done by hand. And the crew members would have been called Gandy Dancers, but not by me, after all a couple of them had sledge hammers.

Rick Wells says this project from Porter to Tulsa will replace 11,000 cross ties.