The Loram Rail Grinder at Night

Video from April 22, 2017

At the beginning of the video, we are surprised to see the Loram Rail Grinder siting on the siding in Arlington Heights, Illinois. I’d heard that a train like this was used to grind or flatten the top of the rails, but had never seen one.

Whenever track construction is done on this line, this siding is a common place for the equipment to be stored. It has a dead-end and a bypass siding (both of which are only slightly longer than this grinder train). At one end of the siding is a crossover that allows a train pulling off either siding to access all 3 tracks.

We found out that, later today, the train will grind the rails of an 8 mile long section of track between the siding in Arlington Heights and the station in Barrington. The grinder can’t grind in reverse because the heavy-duty water sprayers are at the rear of the train. It starts at the siding, switches to the correct track, backs up all the way to Barrington, then grinds the rails all the way back.

The train switches over to the final of the three tracks and backs up towards Barrington (shown at the 1:30 mark). We drove ahead of it to Barrington, where it reversed direction and started to grind the rails. I had never seen this before and was surprised that there were so many sparks. In the rest of the video we follow the train all the way back down the line. It looks awesome with sparks flying, water spraying, and bright lights covering the train. It eventually stops about a half-mile past the siding (shown at the 13:00 mark). It backs up towards the siding, probably to spend the night there.

In the morning the siding was empty.



How did the Union Pacific Railroad know that the rails needed to be ground down? Click here to see UP’s “Geometry Train:”
   • Union Pacific's Rare "EC-5 Track Evaluatio...