Model Railway Forum

To get to the beach area and restaurants at Victoria Dock in Fremantle Australia you have to cross a railway line.
It is a freight only one track line with many pedestrian crossing places. Through the middle of the track in places there are water pipes about one hundred metres in length with spray outlets spaced at one metre distance apart.
About one minute before a train passes the spray starts and soaks the lines and the train passing over it then shuts off about a minute after the train has passed. There is a warning sign for pedestrians about the spray that also informs you that it is an experimental trial but does not tell you why.
Any one got an ideas? The weather is very hot here and the line is a very long curve so is it to cool the track and the wheels?

I looked it up and apparently it is to stop the loud squeal from the wheels in the residential area.

Way back in 1973 I worked for BR in North Kent. There was a brand new super Cement Works opened at Northfleet in 1970, and to take away the cement and to bring in coal and gypsum a new 'Merry-Go-Round track layout was laid which left the main line just west of Northfleet station, and burrowed under the main line to enter a disused chalk quarry where it diverged with one leg going through one tunnel and the other going through another tunnel to emerge in another quarry where the cement works were situated. The two tracks fanned out into three parallel lines which made a loop round the outside of the works. The coal and gypsum trains passed over a hopper where automatic lineside machines opened and closed the bottom doors on the hopper wagons. The cement wagons passed through a shed built under a huge set of silos where they were filled by gravity.

One of my jobs was to visit the control office ( a kind of signal box) which operated the points and signals in the works and check everything was being carried out correctly.

Above the worked out chalk pits were rows and rows of houses, and we got dozens of complaints that as the trains passed through the system the squealing from the wheels was unbearable. The fact that it was inside a pit seemed to magnify the sound, with echos and reverberations. One comment though was that the residents prayed for rain, because there was no squealing when it was raining.

This information was passed to our technical people who devised a system of tanks, pipes, pumps and sprinklers, which were linked to the signalling track circuits so that as a train traversed the circuit the water jets wetted the rails and killed the noise.

So it looks like the same idea has found its way down under.

Sneaky or what!

I don't have a picture of the sprays at work but here is a gypsum train in the works on the circuit.