Sperry Rail Testing

While the Spring season has just recently started on Long Island (or so the calendar claims), it is also Sperry Rail Testing Season for the LIRR.

Meet the Sperry Rail Testing Vehicle:

(Photo credit: Trains Are Fun/Ernie Murphy)

It's this big yellow and black, self-powered hunk of machinery that crawls all over the railroad and inspects hundreds of miles of rail each year.

And what exactly is it looking for?  Track defects.  I'm sure many remember All These Broken Rails! and All These Broken Rails, Round 2 where there was two couple day stretches in January and March where there were a lot of these things called "broken rails" (read either of those two linked posts for info on broken rails and the trouble they cause).

The Sperry Rail Vehicle goes over many miles of LIRR tracks and uses all of its special machinery to take a very, very, very close look at the rails, and quickly points out any possible defects that have emerged or are about to emerge.  These things use some pretty cool technology to get down to the microscopic level when looking at these rails.  Things from cameras visually inspecting the rail, to sensors detecting any anomalies in the rails, all the way to ultrasound getting a very close look into the very core of the steel.

And it is a very intensive process, inspecting rail.  And it takes this vehicle quite a while to actually get a really good look at the rail.  The Sperry Vehicle crawls along at a snail's pace (like 4-5 miles per hour, at most).

So does this really expensive piece of technology moving around the railroad at 4 miles per hour impact normal train operations?  Of course it does.  Normally for two-tracked segments of track the Sperry Vehicle can be left to do its thing on one track while all the trains are squeezed onto the other one.  This would most likely take place either in the middle of the day or in the wee hours of the morning where there aren't all that many trains running.

So usually when the Sperry Rail Car goes out and inspects some double-tracked territory, we don't hear anything about it.  It just does its business and moves on.  However, when we get to single-tracked territory, things get a bit more complicated.  For areas of the railroad that have only one track (take a look at the 5th map down on the schematics maps page), there really isn't a gap big enough at any time of day that would allow the Sperry Rail Vehicle to do its job without having to pick up and hurry out of the way every hour or so for an oncoming train (the LIRR does run 24 hours a day, after all).

So what the LIRR usually does is bustitute that section of track for a couple hours overnight or during the day on a certain day or days of the week.  The LIRR's timetables page on the MTA's website has all the special timetables if your branch is affected.

Now not every section of track gets tested each year, only about 300 miles get scanned any given year.  And like I said, we usually don't hear anything about testing in double-tracked territory, only single-track territory (because those cause service disruptions).  In past year's we almost always hear about substitute bus service for these segments of track due to Sperry Rail Testing:

• Farmingdale to Ronkonkoma
• Babylon to Montauk
• Valley Stream to West Hempstead
• Huntington to Port Jefferson
• Great Neck to Port Washington

Notice how every one of those segments of track is single tracked (for the majority of it, passing siding's don't count).  Babylon to Sayville is double-tracked, but not really (the way the signalling system is set up only allows trains to be ran a certain way, but I'll get around to explaining that at some point).

Everything else gets tested without disrupting service.  My guess is that the rest of the mainline and Montauk Branch (a.k.a. the Babylon Branch) get tested at some point, as well as the Atlantic Branch, and everything around Jamaica. The "other" branches probably get their turn at some point as well, but some segments (like the Far Rockaway Branch or the Oyster Bay Branch) may not be inspected every year.

Another important thing to note is that the Sperry Rail Car is actually not owned by the LIRR.  It is owned and maintained by Sperry Rail Service which owns many of these railcars and leases them to railroads all over the world for rail testing.  The ones that the LIRR usually gets (#'s 125, 128, and 129 are the usual culprits) are based out of a Sperry facility someplace along Metro-North's Danbury Branch, and are only on the LIRR property at certain times of the year.

The LIRR does have its own "Track Geometry Car," the TC-82, which makes the rounds to all of the LIRR's tracks at some point thorughout the year:

(Photo credit: Trains Are Fun/Joe Gregory)

This vehicle is owned and operated by the LIRR, but it doesn't necessarily do the same things that the Sperry Rail Car does.  The Track Geometry Car checks for things that are amiss in terms of track structure (i.e. rails bent out of alignment, spread too far apart at this point, not straight, etc.) while the Sperry Car tests for internal rail defects.  Two different pieces of equipment for two different purposes.

And one last funny note about these cars: it is reported that they have the tendency to "disappear"  of Centralized Train Control Machines.  With all the equipment on them and the special way they move about, often times they don't "shunt" the signal circuit (so basically they sometimes don't make the link between the two running rails telling the signal system that they are actually there!)  So the all the railroads involved have to be extra careful when these things are out roaming about.  We wouldn't want one getting rear-ended by an M7 coming down the track under a false green signal!