Fire Walking in Chicago

[DSS&A]

Amtrak and Metra trains are "Fire Walking" today because the burners are lit to keep snow off of the switches.

 

[Mystic River Dragon]

How interesting--never seen this before--thanks for posting it!

 

[Just-Thinking-51]

Double slip switch, space savers, but they create there own special issues.

Getting ice and snow up here in NY. Winter had taken a break, but is back again.

 

[DSS&A]

Double slip switch, space savers, but they create there own special issues.

Getting ice and snow up here in NY. Winter had taken a break, but is back again.

The diamonds on the left of the double slip switches are unique. Each diamond, instead of four frogs, has two frogs and two "moving switch points" to reduce wheel and rail impacts.

 

[Metra Electric Rider]

Metra Electric, being modern, uses ducted forced air (gas fired) heaters to do this; no open flame on the lakefront!

(the loft building on the left in the first picture, West Hub, is very cool, but looks like more graffiti than ever)

 

[drdumont]

Here in Dallas (where the area pretty much shuts down with the merest suggestion of ice), they run "news" items showing the flames, telling people this is normal, and to stop calling the FD.

 

[Devil's Advocate]

Metra Electric, being modern, uses ducted forced air (gas fired) heaters to do this; no open flame on the lakefront!

I wonder how the Shinkansen and ICE handle it (no pun intended).

 

[Seaboard92]

A lot of places in the country don’t need switch heaters. Look at SC for instance we get a big snow (2-3 inches) maybe every four or five years. We don’t need a switch heater at all. So we just use kerosene soaked rags and set the switch points on fire to melt the snow.

 

[JRR]

A lot of places in the country don’t need switch heaters. Look at SC for instance we get a big snow (2-3 inches) maybe every four or five years. We don’t need a switch heater at all. So we just use kerosene soaked rags and set the switch points on fire to melt the snow.

If they had done that in Savanah a couple of years ago, I would have had my cross country trip to LA to catch the cruise from LA to Ft Lauderdale. Unfortunately (as was previously reported) the switch froze and the unfroze while the Meteor was backing into the station and derailed it, resulting in the cancellation of my trip the next day.

In any event, the pictures were cool. I've never seen that before.

 

[DSS&A]

The flames work great to melt falling snow and especially built-up snow/ice chunks that fall off the underside of passenger cars as that hit the frog gaps.

 

[PeeweeTM]

I wonder how the Shinkansen and ICE handle it (no pun intended).

In the Netherlands we have natural gas heated installations which use a liquid to transfer the heat to the switches.
But they are now slowly being replaced by electric ones. As far as I know, electric heating is quite common in other European countries.