Got this photo yesterday from alert reader Laura Baenen at the Central Corridor office:

It looks a bit like a Door County fish boil, but it’s actually how they fuse sections of light-rail track together.  The photo was taken in the Minneapolis Warehouse District. Laura writes:

Two welders put a clamp on the two parts of rail to be joined, heat it up with an acetylene torch, place a metal bucket with chemicals over the spot to be welded and set it off with a fuse, causing sparks to fly up in the air for about 30 seconds.

Sounds like something out of “Mythbusters.”

There was supposed to be more of this today — Laura had invited me down to watch them connect the last piece of rail between the existing Hiawatha Line and the new Twins stadium/intermodal station — but they hurried up and finished all the welding last night because of the looming rain. That stretch of track is to open to Hiawatha trains in late 2009 when the Northstar commuter-rail service starts up.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.