Deth

Amtrak has been blowing their horns a lot more than usual lately. It turned out that it’s because they’re doing track replacement in this area on the Keystone corridor. At some point, they laid new tracks along the old ones.

There have been smaller machines going along the tracks for the past week or two, but last week, walking to Joy’s we noticed what appeared to be a freight train with ties sitting at the train station. Sadly, it wasn’t running then because that would have been a spot to get a great view of it.

Last night, some piece of machinery idled all night right outside the house. It wasn’t as annoying as it could have been. The track replacement was sitting on the curb part way between here and the Mount Joy train station.

Today I heard a lot more activity out there, so I went over to the bridge again to check it out. The track machine was partially around the corner, with some cars well past us. I didn’t realize how long that was.

While I was over there, one of the guys said hi. He’d been standing on the other side of the bridge watching. Turns out he’s a lineman watching the wires. I asked him about the machine and the timing of when it’d get to the bridge, and he told me. He also told me about the cool machines he uses.

I was surprised how slow how slowly the machine moves but I guess it’s doing a lot of work. If they had to do it all manually it would likely be a lot slower.