Why Are There STONES Along Railway Tracks?

🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com The next time you wait at a railroad crossing while a long train rumbles by, look down. Look beneath the train, under those heavy steel rails and the wooden beams they rest on. And there you will see the same thing you would see under any railway anywhere in the world. Stones. Thousands upon thousands of them. Rough, gray, sharp-edged broken stones, piled up under the track and running off into the distance. It does not matter whether the railway is in England, or India, or right here in Pennsylvania. The stones are always there.And here is the question that ought to stop you. Why? We can pour concrete a foot thick. We can build a road smooth and solid as a tabletop. So why would the railway men lay their tracks on a loose heap of broken rock instead of bolting them down to something good and solid? It seems backward. But it is not backward at all.I am Elias Yoder. I am Amish, and I farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Now I will say plainly, I am no railroad man. We travel by buggy and by horse. I have never laid a foot of track in my life. So I am not going to pretend to be a railway engineer. I am a farmer who has stood at a good many crossings waiting for a long freight to pass, who looked down one day at all that broken stone and got curious about why it was there. And what I found is that the answer is built almost entirely out of plain old sense I already knew from the farm, from building, and from working with stone and water my whole life.What I walk you through:✔ Why plain soil cannot bear the crushing weight of a loaded train, and how the stone bed (called track ballast) spreads that weight so the ground can hold it ✔ How the track is laid in layers like a cake: steel rails on top, crossbeams (sleepers or ties) beneath, all bedded down in stone ✔ The surprise most folks never guess: the track is not bolted to the earth at all. It floats on the loose stone, held by its own weight and the friction of the rough stones ✔ Why that flexibility is the whole point. A thing with a little give absorbs the pounding and survives, where a rigid thing cracks under the same force ✔ Why the old dry stone walls, laid up with no mortar, outlast walls poured rigid and solid, the very same truth at work ✔ Why the stones are sharp and jagged instead of smooth and round, and how smooth stone would roll apart while sharp stone interlocks and locks the rails in place ✔ How the loose pile fights water, draining the rain straight through like a great French drain, where bare dirt would wash to mud and concrete would pool and rust the steel ✔ How the dry, shifting stone starves out weeds so their roots cannot break up the foundation ✔ The surprise hiding in the very word ballast, which comes from the sea and the heavy stone sailors once loaded to steady an empty shipThe plain truth underneath it all: one humble heap of broken rock does the work of a weight-bearer, a cushion, a lock, a drain, and a weed killer, all at once, and asks for almost nothing in return. There is nothing in it a careful farmer or an old stone mason did not already know in his own way.This is one of a series on Elias Yoder Explains, where I take the ordinary things of daily life that everybody handles and nobody really understands, and explain them plainly, the way the careful old folks understood them.Tell me in the comments below. Had you ever stopped and wondered about those stones, or did you walk past them ten thousand times and never once ask why they were there? And if any of you are railroad men, or worked the tracks, I would be glad to hear from you. If I have got a corner of it wrong, set me straight and teach the rest of us. I read every single one.Next video: why those enormous freight trains can pull such impossible loads, a hundred loaded cars and more, when the engine itself does not seem near big enough for the task, and the old plain trick of iron wheel on iron rail that makes it possible. Subscribe so you do not miss it.#RailwayStones #TrackBallast #HowThingsWork #AmishWisdom #PennsylvaniaDutch #Railroad #Trains #Engineering #DryStone #PlainSense #FrenchDrain #RailwayHistory #SimpleExplained #EliasYoderExplains #EverydayEngineering