For community residents that live near unpaved roads, there’s an obvious, and understandable, concern about the health, safety and environmental impact of road dust control measures used on their roads. There are a number of ways that chemical dust control products can move from the intended location: Over-spraying the sides of the road during application can leak the product into …
The Key to Successfully Converting Paved to Unpaved Roads
In a recent two-part series on how to think about the costs associated with unpaved roads, we introduced the idea that utilizing effective dust control and stabilization can allow you to create a road that has the low overall carrying costs of a gravel road but also has the strength and durability of a paved road. Today we’ll be tackling a …
Don’t Let Harsh Winter Conditions Derail Your Trains
Even with today’s advances in technology, severe winter weather continues to exert huge pressure on derailment prevention. Winter months see operations costs explode as railways fight snow and ice buildup, cold temperatures, significant delays, breakdown of equipment and increased manhours. But by far the worst, and most expensive, cost of winter weather are accidents, with the accompanying losses in injuries, …
Road Management Process: Extending the Lifecycle and Performance of Unpaved Roads
In the previous article in this series, we discussed how to understand the various road maintenance costs that go into your road management process including the repair and rebuilding of unpaved versus paved roads. Midwest has developed a proprietary method for achieving the pros of both paved and unpaved roads, while minimizing the cons of both, based on our latest research and …
What is Winter Costing Your Railroad?
Larger railroads have a fairly sound idea of the financial impact that severe winter weather can have on their railway maintenance costs. And so they prepare well in advance. But for many short lines, the costs to properly prepare are intimidating. And so they wait, until they can’t wait any longer. But is putting off the expense the best approach …