How Are Rails Bent?

You'd be surprised:

Rusty

wild mary posted:

How do the MOW guys bend the rails?

One tie at a time...

Thanks Rusty and Jim.  Now I know the rest of the story.

Long strips of rail will flex as shown above.  However short fit in curved pieces and small number turnout pieces use a three point roller system somewhat like the guard rail benders that highway dept uses.

Non roller prototype bending:

Hobby rail bender:

You're right Rich. I've used a manually powered hydraulic rail bender and broke rails being too greedy trying to bend light rail used in tunnel construction back a few years ago.

How do you keep it straight.

Loading and unloading rails was always fun when the public would ask how we bent them around the curves and straightened them back up.

I also remember when we use to make our own bent stock rails, manually. Was always fun crank the jack to bend them.

Mike CT posted:

How do you keep it straight.

Again...one tie at a time.

The other end of a spike puller bar doubles as your crow bar for these projects.

So, from Rusty Traque's first two pics above of ribbon rail trains on curves... I'd guess the answer to how they bend rails to lay on track curves is that they load them onto trains, drive the train onto the curve to bend the rails to proper curvature, then unload the bent rails in place (by uncoupling the train at its mid-point and pulling on both ends at once to drop the rails onto the ties), and spike em down on the curve.
And see his 3rd pic where they are unloading rail... don't try to go through a girder bridge with those outriggers extended like that. Trust me, it doesn't work out well.

LOL! Yeah...that's it, Wyhog. That's how it's done.