Rail Mount Plowing System
The rail mount plowing system devised by Ledcors
Bernie Stene and Lionel Desmarais to lay fibre-optic cable along
existing railway tracks improved upon the system previously used.
The earlier rail-mounted system had an inherent
disadvantage, their patent claim noted: "First, the capital cost of the
equipment utilized is unnecessarily high. Second, if a train is required
to use the same tracks as the cable laying equipment during the cable
laying operation, the locomotive and flatcar must find a siding where
the train may pass. Such a siding may be located a good distance from
the working site of the cable laying with the result that there is a
non-productive transportation downtime involving all of the expensive
equipment."
The second cable laying system pervious to their own,
delivered from a platform which straddled the tracks, often damaged the
ties, and was cumbersome to remove from the tracks to allow a train to
pass through.
Stenes and Demarais device used a platform mounted
on rubbers wheels which were outside the tracks, along with rail wheels
which allowed the vehicle to travel along the tracks. The platform could
easily travel along the rail lines, and was also relatively easy to
remove from the rails when a train was coming through.
The plow for digging the cable trench was mounted at
one end of the platform, along with a cable feeder device. The plow
could be positioned on either side of the platform, and the system could
lay cable at different depths, depending on the requirements.
This rail-mounted system was used by Ledcor and its partners to lay
thousands of kilometres of fibre-optic cable across Canada and the
United States. The fibre-optic cable in turn, is used by
telecommunications firms to provide for data, voice, and Internet
services.
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