00:00Why do workers lay ice on the rails in summer?
00:03And no, it's not an attempt to cool them down in the summer heat.
00:06It's a well-thought-out engineering procedure,
00:08without which the railways would simply fall apart within a single season.
00:11It's all about physics.
00:13Steel expands in the sun and contracts in the cold.
00:16If you fix a rail at an arbitrary moment,
00:19without taking temperature into account,
00:20in six months it will either bend into an arc or break due to internal stress.
00:24To avoid this, the rails are given what is known as a temperature condition
00:28before they are fixed.
00:29They are heated or cooled to a strictly defined temperature,
00:32which is considered neutral for the given region.
00:35Special heaters, ordinary ice blocks, and sometimes even liquid nitrogen are used.
00:40The rail is compressed or stretched to the calculated length,
00:43with each deviation measured.
00:45And only after that, it is firmly fixed.
00:48The track secured in this way becomes monolithic,
00:50but it retains its neutral dimension.
00:52In summer it expands, in winter it contracts,
00:55but it always remains within safe limits,
00:57without distortions, cracks, or accidents.
01:00This method is called a continuous welded rail,
01:03and it is precisely thanks to it that trains can run along the tracks
01:07without joints or clanking,
01:08smoothly and quietly, in any weather.
Comments