Re: Weber Patent Rail Joint

The two-foot Sandy River & Rangley Lakes at one time used Weber joints from Strong to Farmington.
When I worked for the Boston & Maine in the sixties through the eighties, the Conway Branch was laid in large part with 72 and 85 lb. rail jointed with Weber joints right up to when the New Hampshire North Coast Railroad took over the branch and changed the rail to (I think) 112lb. The Conway Scenic Railroad still uses Weber joints on most of the old B&M Ex-Conway Branch portions of it's tracks. At one time, the then CSRR Roadmaster, Wayne Allen, contracted a local firm to make the wood fillers for the joints. He claimed that with light usage such as excursion trains, the joints gave a smoother ride than conventional joints and, like a wooden car, would "give" instead of "pound" like the conventional steel joints. All you had to do was to keep them well-tamped. If not taken care of, most of them would wear out at the bolt-holes. They may have been deemed a failure for heavy main-line use, but they were more than adequate for light branch use with ten mile maintenance sections until the era of gang cycling, when tracks were allowed to deteriate until the next time they were scheduled to be "renovated" depending upon the financial policy of the company at the time...