On Wednesday, August 20, 2014 1:42:51 PM UTC-4, Michael Terrell wrote:
David Billington wrote:

May depend on the quality of maintenance the rails had. When my dad

worked at Boeing in Wichita a work colleague had a rail spike on his

desk and when asked where it came from was told from a local active main

line and he had just pulled it out by hand. I can remember thinking some

of the sleepers looked in a poor state in the area but didn't think

spikes would actually be loose.





I saw a lot of them that loose as a kid. We would use a railroad

bridge to cross a creek, and a lot of them could be pulled by hand. The

scary part was it was a private line that was used by a steel mill 10


miles away to haul slag. The bridge had a platform half way across, so

people could get off the track if a train came around the bend while

they were near the middle.

Yeah well, if I were iggy, I'd just call a crane and leave pulling everything out to them. Its probably safer too, because all this speculation and do-it-yourself crap is for the birds.