Painting the sides of railroad rails white to reduce derailment
up.com108 points by zdw 15 hours ago
108 points by zdw 15 hours ago
In a somewhat related practice, some roads in the Tour de France this year have been painted with "white shit" (rider Tom Pidcock's words) in order to combat the asphalt melting in the heat, with the unfortunate side-effect that it seems to be slippery and several riders (including Tom Pidcock) crashed going around a corner when the lost traction.
Coverage here: https://velo.outsideonline.com/road/road-racing/tour-de-fran...
But of course, this was done in response to past serious crashes that occured because the asphalt melted. So, it's sort of a damned if you do damned if you dont scenario for the organizers.
Pepe's Towing in Los Angeles reports asphalt collapses where loaded semitrailers are parked with the landing gear down. On hot days the concentrated load of the landing gear sometimes punches through the asphalt.[1]
This is why truck dock areas are usually paved with concrete.
Years ago Chicago started putting concrete pads on the road at bus stops because the busses stopping in the exact same spot repeatedly was carving ruts into the asphalt.
A city I used to live in did the same thing when they refurbished all the major bus stops. I always wondered why
Also if a vehicle is stopped and the driver turns the wheel (with power steering this isn't hard) - it will eventually drill holes in asphalt - you can sometimes see this in house driveways where someone turns around.
Yeah, my city is currently going through every bus stop in the city, redoing the pavement in concrete. Construction season has been nasty for us this year :p
Motorcycle riders also report their sidestands sinking into asphalt on very hot days, to the extent that many of them carry some kind of wide weight-spreading thing to put under the stand. Apparently a face plate (?) for an electrical junction box works great.
Usually, a crushed soda can is good enough to prevent the kickstand to sync in the pavement. You can usually find a can in a random parking lot. That, or find a strip of concrete. That's why sometimes motorcycle park on the sidewalk in front of big box stores on a hot day.
This isn't a new thing in the Tour and it is normally not a problem, but since someone crashed on it then it must be the "white shit" that caused it. Not one of the hundreds of other variables - like the rider.
> But of course, this was done in response to past serious crashes that occurred because the asphalt melted. So, it's sort of a damned if you do damned if you don't scenario for the organizers.
Well, not entirely. You always have the option of repaving the roads with cobblestone or something.
Or just have the cyclists use fatter tyres.
That would also require fatter wheels. Which together have higher moment of inertia which makes for slower bikes (as more energy is required to get the wheels to the same speed).
Not exactly what people want in a race.
And yet fatter tyres are faster than the slimmer ones they used to run. No-one run slim tyres these days.
Hopefully they have a sandblaster mounted to the same train to clean the rails first, else they're gonna have to do this again every year...
At least they're doing something.
I couldn't believe the state of US railtrack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI
Just go slower! We don't want to pay for maintenance. What's the worst that could happen? You derail and your toxic payload catches fire and poisons the neighbourhood?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio,_train_de...
It's funny you mention that, since I mentally associate Union Pacific with the worst of US rail disinvestment. They're the ones that were patient zero for the "precision scheduled railroading" brainworm that led all our railroads to downgrade track and lengthen trains to insane lengths[1]. Or at the very least, they were at the top of Amtrak's delay-shaming list until a few years ago[0] when they somehow improved???
...anyway, I'm now genuinely wondering how the hell rail in such an awful state can still maintain the correct gauge for trains to run on!?
[0] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
[1] Salt Lake City is trisected by Union Pacific freight rail. We have some of the largest city blocks in North America, but they're still not long enough to avoid a single stopped Union Pacific train blocking multiple crossings for hours on end. If you want to really, REALLY hate trains, move to the west side of SLC.
Also, talk to your politician about the Rio Grande Plan.
I'm surprised that this is as effective as the numbers suggest. I would have thought steel rails would be pretty good at reflecting/radiating heat. TIL.
> “When people first saw it, they said, ‘Why haven’t we been doing this for a hundred years?’” Doerr said. “That’s the kind of question I love to hear, because it means the culture of safety innovation is alive and well.”
Union Pacific haven’t been doing this precisely because they don’t have a culture of innovation…
This of course beeing the effect of seemlessly welded together rail with nowhere to go..
Indeed. Didn't they used to have expansion gaps?
They did. It's what caused the click-clack sound trains used to have, and the change to continuous welded rail is why there is no click-clack anymore.
"That’s huge. If you’re not fighting the sun’s heat, you dramatically reduce the risk of the rail shifting.”
Am I misreading or does this say the opposite of what they meant?
I think the safety officer meant that white paint prevents the rail from heating up. The heating of rails contributes to problems with derailment. If the heat isn't a contributor, that heat is one less thing you have to fight (as in account for).
But the photo caption paraphrases him and says that the white paint fights (as in prevents) the heat, which uses similar words but a different logic to it (but the same overall meaning).
If I've got that right, then I think the blame lies on whoever wrote this article for making it confusing.
You are misreading. Basically the white paint is "fighting the sun's heat".
But that's backwards. I took it to mean the rails or the engineers are no longer fighting (coping with) heat input from the sun because the rail never receives that heat when it's reflected away by the paint.
It means the paint is fighting the energy conversion potential encroaching on the steel, in place of the steel fighting it with no covering or shield
I love a simple solution to billion dollar problems
...that will be done for a few years, dwindling quality and measurement, lack of continuous data collection, or sparse, which loses 'track' of performance and effect. Then, lots of subcontractors will use the wrong paint (maybe a black market appears), incorrect application, too thick too thin on top instead of the sides... more derailments start occuring because the whole program gets used to boost stock price and try to get fed contracts instead of actually engineering a solution and maintaining it as protocol.
Lots of major industrial specialty paint manufacturers and white labelers are publicly traded, owned by BR & VG.
this isn’t the point of the story, but is that paint truck driving on the railroad tracks?
Yes, they're called "high-rail" or "road-rail" vehicles. They have rail wheels that can be lowered down to drive on tracks or raised up for road use.
And sometimes the axel is short (narrow), so the tires are on the rail. It's funny to see them on a standard road.
Practical Engineering already explained the correct solution to this problem:
https://youtu.be/zqmOSMAtadc?si=UUlmnk9sI-leq0SV
But of course, American infrastructure was built on the cheap, and is not maintained correctly. This is why we can't have nice things.
> American [rail] was built on the cheap, and is not maintained correctly
Cheap yes, but definitely well maintained.
It's certainly been doing better since the previous US administration put some cash in the infrastructure jar.
2025 Infrastructure Report Card | ASCE
The 2025 grades range from a B in ports to a D in stormwater and transit. For the first time since 1998, no Report Card categories were rated D−. Among the 18 categories assessed, eight saw grade increases.
I dare say the next report card might not be so rosy.
Rail: B-
~ https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/rail-infrastru...
Why couldn't this also help with continuous-welded rail?
Your own video points out that it's still prone to trade-offs: rail breaks in the cold are better than buckling in the heat, but what if you could reduce the high point with white paint so you could expand the practical temperature range?
We have like 220,000 miles of railroad. We do have nice things: a working freight railroad system that helps reduce transit costs.
If the freight rail system were as good as it should be, long distance trucking would be a rounding error instead of the dominant freight mode.
Long distance trucking gets heavily subsidized by all other road users. Damage is caused by the fourth power of weight, but trucking only paid 35% of maintenance while being responsible for 99% of the cost.
https://truecostblog.com/2009/06/02/the-hidden-trucking-indu...
Trucks and trains serve different purposes. My understanding is the US has a higher percentage than most of freight carried by rail. Indeed at the expense of its passenger rail
Airlines killed passenger rail, not freight. Prior to it all being rolled into Amtrak virtually every railroad was losing money on passenger service.
The Post Office shifting mail transport from trains to planes is what changed the economics.
The passenger trains also carried mail, which helped make them profitable. Then the mail, and the money, moved to passenger planes.
> Union Pacific Is Tackling Rail Heat to Keep America’s Freight on Track
Someone talked to an LLM which convinced them they had a brilliant idea.
Just a guess ...
You can literally buy derailers[1]. People will find away around this, making white paint useless. Engineers need to engineer.
Do NOT use where speeds exceed 5 m.p.h.
Derailers are common and are placed where people are working on tracks so a runaway car will go off the tracks instead of hitting the workers.
Reducing derailment by decreasing track movement by painting the does of the track white, to reflect heat absorbed from the sun.
- maybe consider electrifying the entire freight network of the USA like some of the other countries have done (mind you very large countries)
- then you might not have to worry increasing heat levels that much
Why would electrification prevent track from warping due to heat from the sun?
cuts down carbon footpriunt which in the long run ll help cut down temperatures
If we are in the long run stabilising that would be already a win. Until the temperatures go down it will be a long, long, long time if ever. So temperatures will go up and we have to adjust. The scale of required adjustments is not understood yet and the increasing number of surprising needs to adjust is scary.
If we get to a point where direct sunshine all afternoon isn't hot, we're going to be in a big block of ice.
There's a lot more low hanging fruit with higher payoff than optimizing all rail in the USA.
Also, a guess, but I think you might benefit from checking out the actual size of countries vs the Mercator projection size of countries.
Paint everything white! Why stop at rails?
Mostly because it doesn't stay white and looks bad. But it doesn't stop people from painting their siding white, for example.
Why paint the sides of the rails? Well you can paint the tops, but it tends to gum up the wheels and get worn off.
You want a paint with high reflectivity and high emissivity. Just be sure you aren't using infrared light temp measurement as to measure and make claims about differences in temperature, emissivity is something to watch out for when measuring temperature in that way.
20 degrees is surprising, I sure wish my car was white in the summer.
I wonder if you have okay effects with white rails in the winter?
> Why paint the sides of the rails? Well you can paint the tops, but it tends to gum up the wheels and get worn off.
Tops of rails are already pretty shiny for any mainline track seeing a couple dozen trains a day. I'd bet they are more reflective than white paint could be. And the paint would be gone after the first train passes through anyways.
They rust pretty quick, but with regular use it doesn't build up much since it's constantly being worn off from the wheel friction.
Thank you, I was wondering why the need for paint rather than side polishing and the added knowledge that this blend of Steel rusts would ruin that for the non-contact surfaces.
Painting it cheeper than polishing. But I wanted to know the reason they needed to / that made it so.
The top of the rail is already white!!!
It's just polished, so that it is reflective.
If you sanded it with your 180 grit paper, you would get the scattering which appears white.