Hi Rail Inspection: Fill & Download for Free

You can only drive trucks on a railroad track with the permission of the railroad. Railroad tracks are the private property of the railroad, and if you don’t have permission they can charge you with trespassing on their property. They have their own railroad police who will arrest you.Churchill Mayor Mike Spence greets two hi-rails, pick-up trucks converted to run on rails, which inspected the tracks to Churchill, the first rail vehicles since the tracks washed out two years before.[1][1][1][1]There are no roads to Churchill so the rail line was the only way to get there before it was washed out, and you couldn’t get there at all afterwards except by ship or air.However, you can drive on public roads if you have a driver’s license from the relevant authority. If you don’t have a driver’s license you are trespassing, and they will fine you or arrest you. Some “sovereign citizens” have trouble understanding this basic concept.If you happen to own a private railroad track or a private road you can drive on it to your heart’s content with only your own authorization. This is why Queen Elizabeth doesn’t need a driver’s license, she owns all the roads in the UK.Personal aside: When I was a kid some people I knew used to partially deflate the tires on their cars and trucks and drive on the railway tracks. I can’t recommend this because it is illegal, not to mention dangerous. You could always meet a train at a point where you couldn’t get off the tracks, and the trains couldn’t stop.Footnotes[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/churchill-rail-repair-vehicles-1.4855050[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/churchill-rail-repair-vehicles-1.4855050[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/churchill-rail-repair-vehicles-1.4855050[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/churchill-rail-repair-vehicles-1.4855050

Hand cars are a lot of fun - when you’re on a railroad where you have radio contact with the dispatcher, know you’re not going to be accidentally run over by a train, and aren’t planning on actually getting any real work done after your arms get tired pumping the car along.Modern pickup trucks with “hi-rail” wheels (additional wheels that ride along the rails and keep the truck tires aligned with the steel rails, so it can drive on the tracks like a train) are much faster, safer, and carry more equipment with them. Railroad pump cars, or push carts, need to be pushed along the tracks. You’re either walking along pushing it, or pumping the pump cart with your arms and shoulders. Railroads are big. You can walk long distances at 2–3 miles per hour. I would say that on a pump car, you could do 6 miles per hour. A 10-mile section of railroad would take 1.5 hours just to go from one end to the other by pump car. If you found a flaw, or something that needed to be fixed, add in another half hour to make the repair. Since the 1850s, most trains could EASILY cover that 10 miles in under half an hour. The railroad couldn’t just shut down because you had to go inspect the tracks - you would still be passed by other trains on other tracks, and you would have to be very careful that another train wouldn’t come and accidentally run you over. If a train needed to pass you, you were expected to manually PICK UP your cart, and carry it off the tracks, and put it down on the gravel out of the way. You didn’t have a radio of any sort, or any power to run tools. Everything you might need, you had to carry.A pickup truck solves pretty much all of those problems. I think on most railroads, a hi-rail truck can go up to 15mph on the railroad. I’m pretty sure that the cruise control should still work, so you just set it, and off you go. The heat and air conditioning should work too! There’s plenty of room for a railroad radio to communicate with the dispatcher, or other trains in the area. It’s possible to put a welder, or a small air compressor in the back to provide power to use power tools. If you need to get off the rails to let a train pass, you stop at the nearest road crossing, and spend about 3 minutes cranking up the railroad wheels, and to park on the side of the road, and the train can pass you.

Format of question when I answered it: If railroads have trucks that drive on tracks for maintenance, why are there dirt roads next to all railway tracks?Because when those trucks (called “hi-rail vehicles”) run on the tracks, trains cannot use those tracks. Such vehicles cannot usually activate the signal system, plus they are not crash-safe to run with trains running nearby, so trains are not usually allowed in the blocks that a hi-rail vehicle is running in. Plus, not all railroad-owned trucks have hi-rail capability. Many rail lines in the US, that are not along some kind of public or even private road, have a railroad-owned dirt or gravel road near the track. In some cases, it might not be much more than a trail. Lightly used rail lines are the most likely to not have a road along the track.Most of the time, those vehicles you see riding on the track are there to inspect the track, not to repair it. If something is found in need of repair, the repair vehicles will travel to the location by road instead of tying up the track. Many repairs, such as involving signals, do not require the railroad to be shut down.