California Surveyors Forums

I want to thank everyone at CLSA responsible for putting this seminar on,especially Crissy and the central office. This could easliy be a much longer class. thanks. i believe it clearly showed the importance of practicing within an area where you are competant.

If the purpose was to just let everyone know what they don't know, and warn them to stay away from railroad surveying until and unless we get the years of training to approach the speaker's level of knowledge on the subject, I agree. That goal was achieved.

I felt that the speaker demonstrated some disdain for those who were not knowledgeable of information that is not necessarily readily available through well known channels.

However, the speaker was obviously very knowledgeable in this type of surveying. The handouts alone were worth the price of admission. The discussion of which sources to check for various information was invaluable. It also demonstrated that research into railroad information is far from straightforward and simple. If you know the sources, the info is sometimes only mildly difficult to find as compared to most other documentary info we gather for a survey. At worst, it can become an incredibly time consuming and expensive proposition which may not yield the information you seek.

IMO, this seminar could be greatly improved by spending 15 minutes on the importance of safety, and the practical and legal consequences for ignoring RR safety. The speaker spent the first 45 minutes on that topic and revisited it often. All told, I would estimate that about an hour and a half was spent on that topic.

Most of us will not be involved in staking RR alignments and facilities, but nearly all who attended have or will at some point retrace and/or need to reestablish a portion of RR RW as part of a survey of adjacent property.

There is plenty to learn about retracement and reestablishment of RR RW to easily fill a full day seminar. Knowing that the alignment smoothing machine can affect the track alignment, and knowing that one cannot rely wholly on the CL alignment to reestablish the RW can be conveyed in 5 minutes. We did not need over 30 minutes of discussion of that machine.

I'd like to here some feedback from the Ontario session to see if he alters his presentation any.

Mr. Tucker has an incredible amount of knowledge on the subject of RR surveying. I'm sure that he could make a useful presentation on any aspect of it that he touched on last Friday.

Perhaps some case studies stepping throught the process with docs and slides of what was done when the surveyor got it right and where the surveyor got it wrong.....

I was going to go to the seminar but couldn't. So, where should I go to find the source of the RR right-of-way. I typically find the instrument of conveyance (Deed)?.

Eric,

That question could be the topic of nearly a day's worth of seminar in itself. I assume that you are talking about the conveyance for the property abutting the RR since the conveyances to the RR are usually not found at the Recorder's office.

I take that back, to a degree. If the RR came in after most or all of the land in the area had already been patented, there's a pretty good chance that you would find RR RW deeds at the Recorder's.

The speaker seemed to be more honed in on areas where the RR land was patented from the Feds. Those records can be tough to find if you can't get them from the BLM. Once you've tried that source and struck out, you're on a research adventure.

In spite of the crticisms I offered above, I recommend attending the seminar. If you can't, and find yourself working along a RR RW and needing a research source, give me a holler and I'll see if I can find something in the handouts that might get you going in the right direction.


Dane,

I agree, case studies in RW retracement would have been very helpful and more interesting than the finer points of track alignment adjustment.

I've been fortunate to find most of the patents in the SB Recorders office (Deeds around 1850's) or they've been mapped already in the more urban area's.

Be very careful what mapping you rely on if it didn't come from the RR. Even then, RW may not be offset directly from CL, and in the case of curves, very rarely is, according to Mr. Tucker.

Are you sure there are no monuments?
I retraced some of the coast rail R/W in northern San Diego County. The old railroad station plats did not clearly indicate monuments on centerline, but a very enterprising local surveyor had dug up 3" open pipes well below the grade. One was at an even milepost and another was a EC in an area where the R/W had been realigned in the 1920's and was now off the mail line. I looked at that and it was down about 4 feet. The railroad surveyors must have set them in building the line way back when. If the line is active it will be darned near impossible to look for centerline monuments, but if it has been abandoned, it is worth a look.

"locate the center of the rail that faces the tracks for the right-of-way"

Can you clarify this? I've seen these, but offhand can't recall whether the top (wheel) side of the rail or the bottom (flat) side was facing into the ROW.

The former would seem more intuitive to me, as that would put the monument entirely inside the ROW, but I could envision the other as well. In either case that would mean you'd want to locate the flat side, but I don't think that's what you said.

Color me confused.

.

Tracy,

You are extrapolating the meaning of my comment to a ludicrous level.

If that person you mentioned who missed the 15 minutes of safety I would have rather seen goes out and starts surveying on an active track and gets injured or killed, the first question that will be asked will be "Did he complete the 8 hour Contractor Orientation course?", promptly followed up with "Why the he!! not!!?", and "How in the he!! was he allowed out here!!??"


You said "I worked on a project in a rail yard ..., and we covered safety every single morning before work. When all was said and done, there were zero fatalities. Again, time well spent."

I too worked on the rails. Two years on the Alaska Railroad, and a bit of mapping on SP facilities in CA. Whenever we were anywhere near tracks on the ARR, we were either with, or in radio contact with a RR railworker at all times. We had regular meetings in which safety was always discussed and was occasionally the main or only topic of the meeting.

Here in CA, the company I was working for a few years back wanted to propose on some rail projects. Prior to being awarded any work, all of our field personnel had to complete the 8 hour Contractor Orientation.

If anyone is working on an active rail, they will have had to complete the required safety course and will most likely be accompanied by a RR employee who is in radio contact with the dispatcher and is monitoring the rail channels. If someone is working without benefit of these safety measures, they are in trespass and opening themselves and their company up to criminal prosecution. The RRs take safety and liability very seriously.

The legal consequences for violation are fines amounting to tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention the cost of legal defense the violator will incur.

The practical consequences range from getting fired for putting your company at risk, to death. Do you not see the loss of life as the ultimate practical consequence?


In addition to the live presentation, we were given handouts. In those handouts are some of the safety information that was covered.

An adequate discussion of the legal actions which would be taken by the RRs, the loss of opportunity for any future ability to work along the RR, a presentation of actual accidents involving surveyors or other contract workers, and sources for appropriate safety training could have been accomplished in about 15 minutes. Beyond that, they can only echo what will be presented in the REQUIRED safety course anyway, and not cover it adequately.

So, in your example, a surveyor attends this seminar but misses the 15 minutes of safety discussion, never goes through the handouts, somehow goes to work on an active RR without having obtained the required safety training and without having any of the required safety precautions in place, and does not pay attention to what is going on around him, gets himself injured or killed by getting hit by a train or other piece of rail equipment.

To that I say, we can only do so much to protect someone from their own idiocy. Maybe the next guy will pay attention, not skirt proper procedures, and not circumvent the law.

I hope this clears up my stand on the importance of workplace safety.

Armand
The bulb (wheel) side of the T-rail faces the tracks and the flat side faces the adjoiner. That is what I wrote down. The spot to locate is the intersection of a line through the center of the rail with the flat side of the T-rail. There is a diagram that shows this towards the back of the hand out.

Jim

Prior to this seminar, I was under the impression that when the RW was not monumented, that the tracks were the most reliable monument.

What the speaker told us is that while the tracks utilize spirals to accomodate the transition of trains from traveling straight into a curve and then back out, the RWs utilize simple circular curves. He also noted that the track smoothing device tends to slightly move the tracks horizontally toward the radius point as well as smoothing vertical irregularities, moving them significantly off their original alignment after several such smoothings.

Tangents remain relatively unaffected by that process, and if they have not been relocated since being first constructed, if I understood correctly, can generally be used to relocate the tangent portions of the RW, then fitting the record circular curves between those tangents.

But then, I didn't feel that this was covered as well as it could have been, so I may be filling in some blanks of what he said with what makes sense to me. He spent more time telling us what not to do than he did what to do.


The one main rail line in El Dorado County, which is now abandoned, was never monumented at the RW, and the RW obtained from private parties rather than patented from the Feds, so much of what Mr. Tucker spoke of in terms of research would seem not to apply, and the presumption that there monuments superior to the old CL also seems to not apply.

The original deeds from the 1890s read XX' from the centerline as surveyed. So our question locally is, would that be a surveyed "P" line, or the final surveyed "L" or construction centerline. It would seem that unless the contrary could be shown, the RW of this RR branch would be XX' from the CL of the tracks (or old bed where the tracks have been removed), complete with on offset of the taper curves.

One of our local surveyors tried to bring up this seeming exception to the general rules being presented by Mr. Tucker at least once during the session, and a couple of times during the break. Mr. Tucker didn't seem to understand the basis of the question, so Jack didn't get any direct answers to his questions.

At least we have a lengthy list of resources to go to in a further search for answers.


Ken, depending upon how the RR gained the RR where you're working, you may also be in an area that doesn't fit the general rules. If you email me and let me know which RR you are working with, I'll look through the handout materials and see if I can find some particular contacts for you. It may be that your best source of info will be someone in the map room of that RR.

I did not attend the seminar either. I was always curious about the vertical rails. How well did he say they were set in relation to the tracks? My experience is that they tend to be within a foot or so and cannot be relied upon unless you had no other evidence.

Ventura County: The word from the CS is that most surveyors use the CL of the tracks.

Personal experience: For Santa Barbara County and Ventura County: I've always managed to find a deed cut for the Rail Road. Then I manage to find the tracks, the adjoiners and then I collect as much data as possible. In Carpinteria the rails seem to be within a tenth of the adjacent mapping (based on monuments set at the RR RW.

Other area I've had very little to rely on but managed to piece it together. I would like that contact sheet though, but sometime it's been hard to piece together the stationing information from deeds when you don't have some sort of mapping that shows what station you're at.

I wish they had some of these seminars in the Central Coast. I spend all my vacation time on "continuing education" already!

Bryan, Mr. Tucker placed the vertical rail sections, "T-rails" at the very top of the list of reliability. If they differ from the tracks, it is far more likely that it is the tracks that cannot be relied upon.


Eric, Another point Mr. Tucker made is that the stationing along RRs shouldn't be looked at the same way we would typically view road stationing. Post Miles along RRs are for reference of those navigating the tracks. Due to realignments and other reasons over the years, a mile may not be a mile. He cited one that was only a couple hundred feet long.

There may be particular places where it is reliable, but my understanding is that it is something a surveyor should not rely upon.

Evan

that is interesting because when analyzing a lot of evidence aside from tracks I did not think they were that accurate - even among each other when you are surveying a long tangent portion and trying to get an alignment just using the rails. I will have to check on a couple of old jobs I did and see.

So somewhere there is a map of the vertical rails they set, and they are geometrically related to the R/W on these maps? I'd like to get that contact information, so I can check this out myself.

In San Diego County, the County Surveyor had a lot of the Railroad plats. Especially helpful were the "Station plats". Where there was a train station, apparently the railroad did quite a bit of surveying and made special plats. Often indicated on the plats at angle points in the Right of Way was a set "T-rail" and you can easily find these in the field because there were set with the top 3' sticking out of the ground. Of course after 50 or more year the number that were bent or disturbed by equipment and neighbors was fairly high. My recollection was that there was a certain amount of error between the T-rail posts, but there are better than not finding anything.

E_Page wrote:Bryan, Mr. Tucker placed the vertical rail sections, "T-rails" at the very top of the list of reliability. If they differ from the tracks, it is far more likely that it is the tracks that cannot be relied upon.


Eric, Another point Mr. Tucker made is that the stationing along RRs shouldn't be looked at the same way we would typically view road stationing. Post Miles along RRs are for reference of those navigating the tracks. Due to realignments and other reasons over the years, a mile may not be a mile. He cited one that was only a couple hundred feet long.

There may be particular places where it is reliable, but my understanding is that it is something a surveyor should not rely upon.

To add on to what Evan said. Mr. Tucker said the stationing is track or slope stationing and not horizontal stationing, meaning the stationing on the valuation maps is based on the profile of the track.

It seems they heard the complaints from up north, and really cut back on the "safety" part of the lecture in the beginning of the presentation, to about 15 minutes, although the subject was revisited throughout the day. The twenty-seven thousand dollar personal fine was perhaps the most persuasive argument for not going on the RR right of way without their personnel being present.

A very useful presentation on a subject not routinely encountered, at least in my practice, and the contact list was worth the price of admission (assuming it actually works). Getting the information about the rail road has been a true challenge in my limited experience, so hopefully it will be of assistance. If not I'll give Charlie Tucker a call. You can never have too many sources for evidence.

A reasonably priced and well put together Seminar.
Thanks CLSA, AREMA, Charlie Tucker. and the others for providing this.

"the contact list was worth the price of admission"

Any of you attendees willing to scan and post the contact list?

Thanks.

.

I will try to remember and bring the contact list in to the office tomorrow to scan it, unless someone else does it first.

The other thing you want to do is check out this link:

http://www.rlhs.org/research.htm

It's a "Guide to Railroad Records at the National Archives" by David Pfeiffer (Reference Information Paper 91). Mr. Tucker reccommended printing this out because he wasn't sure how long it would remain available online. You can also obtain a free copy of it by calling the National Archives.

of Records Relating to North American Railroads
Compiled by David Pfeiffer
Reference Information Paper 91