Re: Concrete ties

Moving this back to NG, when SVRy rebuilt their mainline in the late 1930's they built their own tie treatment plant in S. Baker. The ties were placed in a dry kiln and heated and dryed to the max, then immediately while hot placed in vats of "Penta" wood preservative. The dry hot ties took up the Penta apparently very well as there are hundreds of ties out in the woods on the old mainline that are still holding spikes. These spike can not be pulled by hand, therefore the ties are fit for service after 70+ years except that in most but not all cases the underside is quite rotten. When SVRy was through treating ties, for their own use the equipment was retired and reinstalled at it's sister std. ga. rr. the Mount Hood. We have the AFE material covering this for both SVRy and Mt. Hood. We also have correspondence with a manager of one of the class 1's in the NW, IIRC NP at Spokane who was interested in this low cost in house process. That is I assume it was low cost compared to full creosote treat which I believe also involves placing the wood inside vacuum chambers.