November/December 2023 - 15

trains run six days a week, Sunday through
Saturday overnight between 9 p.m. and 5
a.m. when service is not operating.
Rich Mann, assistant chief office for
railroad operations at SEPTA, explains
the agency does not perform slippery rail
cleaning on the Amtrak-owned Northeast
Corridor, but the railroad sees an ancillary
benefit from SEPTA's use of the technique
on its Harrisburg Line.
SEPTA starts using a gel mixture in
December as the weather gets colder. The
authority lays the gel mixture down in front
of the trains along with sand that helps
prevent derailment of the trains. The tanker
car is filled with 500 pounds of the gel.
" Our mechanics will listen to the engineer
and he'll tell us when to turn the gel
on and turn it off, " said Assistant COO
Rail Equipment Engineering and Maintenance
at SEPTA Dennis McAnulla, who
oversees all regional rail and metro rail
vehicle maintenance, as well as rail engineering.
" Typically, that's five catenary
structures prior to the station. When he's
telling us to turn that gel on, he's also
reducing his speed down to five mph. "
Mann explains the importance of the
technique in allowing a train to both stop
at a station and then leave.
" A lot of times when that engineer goes
to take power leaving the station, you can't
get any traction effort on the wheels because
there's slip-slide so you lose time
there, " said Mann. " You lose time coming
in because you're breaking a little further
away and you're breaking a little lighter
application than you normally would so
you can make that stop. "
Mann noted most delays are six to 10
minutes. Precipitation can exacerbate
slippery rail conditions and, in situations
where heavy rain causes more slippage,
delays could be up to 20 minutes.
While slippery rails have been an issue
during the fall season for a long time,
McAnulla explained the technology the
trains have in them are similar to the
ones he used when he first started in the
industry more than three decades ago.
One of SEPTA's three trains that clean
the rails to combat slip-slide.
Photo: SEPTA
" I started my career in maintenance
as a mechanic at Wayne Junction. In the
mid-1990s, we built our first wash train.
We had a Chevy Suburban, utility vehicle
that was a hi-rail vehicle and we put a gel
tub in the back of that. One of the other
things that we did back then is we built
a rail scrubber, which had six motors on
it and it was a hi-rail vehicle that had to
be towed behind a locomotive and still,
today, that scrubber is used on the Norristown
High Speed Line to clean [its] rails
in slippery rail season, " McAnulla said.
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NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2023 | MassTransitmag.com 15
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November/December 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of November/December 2023
