Railroad replacing, selling ties

WASILLA — You might have noticed the orange backhoe-looking thing on the railroad tracks for the past few weeks.

If not, you probably saw the big stacks of lumber next to the tracks. They’ve been there most of the spring.

Alaska Railroad said it will spend most of the summer completing the latest installment of a tie replacement program — those big blocks of wood that hold up the tracks.

“We’re replacing about 50,000 ties this year,” said Stephanie Wheeler, the railroad’s corporate communications director.

About one in four ties will be replaced, at a rate of 800 per day until the fall, covering the tracks from Pittman Road down to Portage.

“It will be just slow, steady progress from May through September,” Wheeler said.

The railroad has been replacing ties since the mid-1990s on a rotating schedule. Ties are useful for 40 to 60 years and the railroad has 2 million of them in use.

She said it takes a team of about two-dozen workers, the bulk of them heavy equipment operators. Before the railroad got hold of that big orange machine they did the job mostly by hand.

“Now they’re using a lot of heavy equipment that is much more efficient,” she said.

But the machines move on the tracks, which means they have to do the job in spurts between trains.

“When we had that window of opportunity at Pittman, they were operating between a passenger train and a freight train that had to go through in a couple of hours,” she said.

Once all of the ties have been pulled up and replaced, she said the old ones will be put up for sale. The Musk Ox Farm in Palmer and the Point MacKenzie Correctional Farm have used old ties to build things.

Gardeners might also find them useful. They’ll go on sale June 11 from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m., and 1 to 4:30 p.m. at the Alaska State Fairgrounds. Ties will be priced at $5 each — or free to eligible nonprofits — and there won’t be help on hand to load them up, so bring some help, as they can weigh up to 200 pounds.

There will likely be another sale the week prior at the Birchwood railroad yard. Details will be posted in local newspapers and on craigslist.org.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.