Excavation

[LoudMusic]

The building across the parking lot from mine is having grease pits installed for their two resturants' waste grease. They've trenched the parking lot revealing lots of interesting things, including what appears to be a bit of small code rail.

Here's a close up

The interesting bit is that my building and the one this rail is nearer to used to be warehouses back in the day. We have 18" thick solid concrete flooring! A real bugger to run network wire through Anyway, this picture shows how the rail pairs up next to their building.

This is downtown Little Rock in the old warehouse district, now it's nearly all office spaces and resturants. In the following picture I've marked in red where rail used to be and in blue where it could have been. Interesting to think about.

Previous construction in the area, which I don't have any pictures of, was when they were installing rail for our new trolley system. They unearthed decades of various roadbeds includng cobble stone and brick paving along with several layers of various concretes and asphalts. It made for quite an interesting time line of downtown Little Rock's transportation.

Little Rock CAT's 'River Rail System'
http://www.cat.org/rrail/

 

[shaygetz]

Cool stuff:thumb: I remember when a heavy rain storm washed up some 80 year old rails from under the highway from back in the day when Ocean City, MD had rail service to and from Baltimore. I love following old right of ways for the artifacts one can find.

 

[brakie]

One of the things I like to do is walk old railroad right of ways..One can find a lot of history by doing this.I guess my oddest thing I ever found on a hiking/bicycling trail was a switch stand embedded in blacktop along the edge of the path..I kicked some weeds back and found several ties ends..It is my guess they just blacktop over the rails and ties.

 

[railohio]

Prototype rail is measured in weight, not like model rail. That doesn't look to be too small, maybe 75 or 80 pound rail. It's probably from an interurban that was abandoned eons ago.

 

[LoudMusic]

One of the things I like to do is walk old railroad right of ways..One can find a lot of history by doing this.I guess my oddest thing I ever found on a hiking/bicycling trail was a switch stand embedded in blacktop along the edge of the path..I kicked some weeds back and found several ties ends..It is my guess they just blacktop over the rails and ties.

I'd bet that's exactly what they did. Removing the old stuff is a lot of work, and then you have to have somewhere to dump it.

 

[TrainNut]

Not that it matters but simply out of curiosity, where on that overhead photo was your closeup photo taken?

 

[LoudMusic]

Not that it matters but simply out of curiosity, where on that overhead photo was your closeup photo taken?

I guess it would have helped to point that out, eh?

There is a long blue line I added, with a bit of red close to the left end. That piece of red runs along side the building that is in the previous picture. I would have been standing to the lower right corner of the red.