The Loram Shoulder Ballast Cleaner
Loram Maintenance of Way, Inc is a big player in the railroad repair and preservation industry. The company designs all kinds of maintenance of way vehicles, and offers top of the line rail quality assurance services.
Loram was founced in 1954 and is based in the United States!
Amongst their catalogue of vehicles and services, one rail vehicle in particular stands out: the Loram High Performance (HP) Shoulder Ballast Cleaner! The self propelled vehicle use two 30 inch wide Digging buckets to clean ballast from end to end, digging to depths of up to 16 inches below the top portion of the rail tie! Tie ends are then undercut to 5 inches, allowing for the restoration of drainage by breaking up mud pockets that had been created over time.
Ballast cleaners are also known as undercutters due to the cutter bar that runs underneath the sleepers!
This machine doesn’t quit there, equipped with its own conveyor belt, the Shoulder Ballast Cleaner transfers the now overly defunct ballast and sifts through it to collect what are simply known as fines: fine pieces of granite that are similar to sand, that when combined with water collected in the ballast stick together, making chunks of stone similar to a lump of concrete. The machine then discharges these fines up to 29 feet away from the centerline of the track!
These bad boys sure do kick up a lot of dust!
After separating the fines from the ballast, and creating a finished reusable ballast product, the Loram HP redistributes the ballast, forming it to the shape specified by the railroad! When the job is complete, the Loram HP is ready for its next project and can hit the rails at speeds of up to 48 mph!
Have you seen one of these in action? Tell us when and where!
