On Saturday, July 16, Colin Mellin, Dwight Maxey, Tyler Seeley, Tanner Seeley and Paul Brown accomplished another step towards improving our track at the Museum. In typical PRM fashion, the crew burned through a couple of inferior hole saw tools, but we persevered and were able to drill the two holes needed to mount a new point guard on one of our switches leading to the shop tracks. While we do have bigger tools to drill holes in rail, we only needed 3/4″ holes for this work and figured hand power tools would do the job. The actual installation of the guard was quite easy.

The point guard is designed to deflect the rail wheel just enough, that the actual point doesn’t take the brunt of the force, and saves the tip from being broken off after many wheels have rolled over it. We hope the addition of the point guard solves one of the issues we are having at this particular switch. We still need to replace 6 or 8 long ties to help support the rails through the switch. After we finished the track work, we did a few other small tasks at the shop to finish up our day.

I have included a few pictures to give you an idea of the work done.

– Paul