Frogless switches at the Tigard station of Portland's oft-delayed Westside Express Service commuter rail line allows the freight cars to clear the station platform and the passenger cars to get real close to the platform using the same track (the platforms wouldn't clear the freight cars otherwise) testing construction KMZ location file for Google Earth: http://wa98121.us/buzz/random/TigardTransitCenter.kmz
=) no ... I just thought that it was an interesting, rarely seen piece of prototype railroading that might give people some ideas
This techinique was (is?) used with car scales. If a car had to be weighed, empty or loaded, the points were set to route the car onto the scale platform rails. Otherwise the points were set to bypass the scale platform rails.
That is called a gantlet track. One of the more famous gantlets (frequently misspelled as "gauntlet", even recently by TRAINS!) was on the CSS&SB west of Gary where two tracks used a gantlet to cross a bridge. Worked well for many years until someone ran a red signal. Much loss of life and very difficult to help because of a steep embankment
Yes. See Wikipedia article linked below...... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauntlet_track BTW, both spellings, "gantlet" and "gauntlet" are accepted as correct.
like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Interlaced-track-with-frog.svg and the whole description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauntlet_track
I believe the Pennsylvania Railroad had a gantlet track at the old "Manhattan Transfer" station on their main line in NJ, to allow the narrower H&M subway cars (now know as "PATH") and the wider PRR coaches to use the same platforms. I don't know if they use frogless turnouts to accomplish this.
As we speak, the Long Island Railroad is spending oodles of money to do the same thing with concrete to fill in the gaps between the cars and the station platforms. :tb-biggrin:
The flange supporting frog in this months Trains is the one that I can't figure out . How does this rearrange itself for the other track ? Here is another oddity , the movable point frog . http://image05.webshots.com/5/2/59/72/72325972FdBgKG_ph.jpg
I can't open your image but is it something like this at the southern end of the passing siding at Nerang on the Gold Coast line? You can see the switch machine that moves the pointy bit of the frog. Here we call them swing nose vee's, local railroaders wouldn't understand the term 'frog'.
There were 2 gantlets on the Erie's double track main in my area. One was right in front of where I work. The main narrowed down to a gantlet and swung out into the middle of the street for 2 blocks, then the main split back up. This is the West end, you can see the tracks coming together at the locomotive. And this is what happens when things don't work as planned. 2 Berkshires sucking face: The tracks were re-routed off the road in 1965 and now the are gone as well and the street is 5 lanes wide (rt 422) The other nearby gantlet was in Sharon, PA to get across a bridge and a tight squeeze down the road with the NYC.
Here is the East end with a EL RS3. The darker tan building in the upper left is the newspaper where I work. Trains had to stop each way and proceed at 25mph.
Yet another photo taken midway: The sign to the upper says "The Tribune" On a side note the Erie, EL, and Conrail all used to ship paper rolls to the newspaper. Erie's freight station was across the street, now there is a gas station there : (
Amtrak has these at the New Carollton station on the NEC (at least they did 20 years ago - haven't ridden the NEC in a while).
Tony- Won't filling in the gap between the cars and the platforms make the cars hard to move?? <ggggg> Charlie Vlk
The dictionary uses "gantlet", but a standard text on Railroad Engineering (Raymond) uses "gauntlet" and defines such tracks as "..two tracks run (ing) together using frogs, but no switches". The arrangement shown is the opposite of it no matter how you spell it (a single track spitting into two overlapping tracks using switches, but no frogs). I don't think it is technically a gantlet/gauntlet but rather a specialized switch. Gauntlet comes from gaunt, which means "being thin and angular". A gauntlet is "a double file of men facing each other and armed with clubs or other weapons with which to strike at an individual who is made to run between them" Such switches were used to offset the centerline of a train for clearance purposes; a notable example was such arrangements along the passenger platforms of the Chicago "L" lines where CTA motors worked freight from a Milwaukee Road interchange north. The use at track scales is the most common, there to keep the weight of a locomotive off the delicate scale platform. The South Shore Line example cited was a true gauntlet track; a double track merged into one using frogs without switches to cross a single track bridge. It was the site of a fatal head-on collision not too many years ago. Charlie Vlk
I've been considering asking FastTracks to make a dual point derail, which is the exact same switch as needed for this just that rather than having four rails two of them end just past the switch to drop the car on the ground. Seeing this I realized a fixture could easily be made to make both a derail and this sort of platform/clearance trackage. That might make it more interesting to make this sort of track. I'm actually thinking I'd like to model this on NTrak, keep the platform away from "oversized" models, but allow passenger cars to snug up prototypically close. Cool!
