The section crews are the men who lay new railroad tracks and keep the old ones repaired. Railroaders call them gandy dancers, and the boss of the crew is the king snipe.

In the old days, all the section work was done with hand tools. Men lifted the heavy rails with tongs. They chipped out the notches in the wooden ties for the rails to rest in. They hammered down the spikes that held the rails. The crew rode to work on a handcar, pumping a lever up and down to make the wheels turn.

Now there are motor cars instead of handcars, and wonderful machines help with the work. A rail-laying crane lifts the rails and swings them into place on the ties. An adzer with whirling knife-blades cuts the notches. The spikes still have to be started into their holes by hand, but then a mechanical hammer that runs by compressed air finishes the pounding job.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that there seem to be a lot of cinders along railroad tracks. But they didn’t come from the engines. They were put there on purpose. Railroads also use chipped stone or gravel or even squashed-up oyster shells under the tracks and ties.

All of these things are called ballast, and they make a good firm bed for the rails. When it rains or snows, the loose pebbly ballast lets the water run off quickly, so that the ties will dry out and keep from rotting.

Grass and weeds don’t grow very well in ballast, but when they do a motor car with a chemical spray comes along and kills them off. When lots of rubbish has collected, a cleaning machine goes to work. The machine is called the Big Liz. It moves down the track, scooping up ballast and sifting out all the dust and junk. Then it squirts the cleaned ballast out again, leaving a clean roadbed behind.

Section crews often have portable telephones or walkie-talkies that save a lot of time. If they need materials, they call up the office and put in the order right away. And if the job takes longer than they expected, they phone a warning to the nearest station where trains can wait until it’s safe to go ahead.

How does the section crew know when it is necessary to put in a new rail? In the old days, they got orders from an inspector who walked or rode slowly along in an inspection car, looking for cracks or breaks. That’s still the way it is done in many places. But some railroads have a machine-detective that finds cracks so small a man couldn’t even see them.

The machine rides in a detector car, and it works by electricity with tubes something like radio tubes. The men who run it simply look at wavy lines drawn on paper by pens that are part of the machine. Whenever the car passes over a cracked rail, the pens make a different kind of line. And right away the section crew is asked to put a new rail in. Summer and winter, the detector cars creep along, making sure that tracks are safe.

In winter, of course, the tracks must be kept clear. If there’s just an ordinary snowfall, a powerful locomotive can run through it with no trouble. But when drifts get deep and heavy, the snow plow must go to work.

The man who first invented railroad snow plows got the idea from watching a windmill. He saw how the windmill blades tossed snow around as it fell. Why couldn’t blades at the front of an engine cut into drifts and toss the snow off to one side? Of course they could. Railroads began using powerful rotary plows. The whirling blades chewed the drifts away. Even in lower country, there’s often plenty of work for the snow eaters to do.