Why Are Chicago’s Railway Tracks On Fire?

As temperatures drop to several degrees below 0°C in Chicago, videos of train tracks on fire in the Windy City have gone viral. The videos show trains running seemingly uninterrupted amid mini flames that appear to have sprung from the railway tracks.

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Metra, a commuter rail system, shared videos on its social media websites and explained that this is a yearly practice which is undertaken to ensure that there are minimum delays to train journeys as blizzards and snowfall often cover the tracks.

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Metra’s communications director Michael Gillis while speaking to Fox Weather said that there are gas burners right next to the switches on the railway tracks that light up the flame. He told the news agency that the apparatus operates in a similar fashion like ‘a kitchen stovetop’ or ‘the gas stovetop’.

“We have about 500 switches in our system, and you really want to keep them warm and keep moisture out of them because you don’t want them freezing up,” Gillis was quoted as saying by news agency Fox Weather. He further added that the switch heaters are located alongside the train tracks in order to keep them warmed up all winterlong. It also allows the trains to move safely, he said.

Gillis highlighted that there are 500 switches in the system and there is need to keep them lit so as to avoid moisture formation in the railway tracks. While speaking to Fox News reporters, he said that some of them are required to be lit manually by railway workers as modern replacements were not feasible in these railroads which are decades old.

“Metra was formed in 1984 out of a bunch of predecessor railroads, and that switching location was built by predecessor railroads decades before Metro ever came into being,” Gillis said. He said at that time gas burners were how workers put switch heaters onto the switches.

Gillis also said that modern railroads and trains are using newer technologies to keep tracks from becoming moist and accumulating snow. He said that hot air blowers which operate in a fashion similar to hairdryers and electrified metal, like a curling iron, are used to keep the switch as metal. This is also necessary as pull-aparts – a phenomenon where metal shrinks and the rails literally pull apart from each other occurs due to the extreme cold that Chicago faces.

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