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Comment by noja | Hacker News Reader

> To prevent this, a big part of railway maintenance involves digging out all the stones, washing them to get rid of sand and soil, and putting them back. Usually done every 25 years or so.

Is this that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqLynLWLd8Y

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In the comments they say that "tampering"[1] is done once every year and the wiki page does not mention cleaning as an objective. Tamping is done to readjust the ballast making the track more more level and durable. (One can infer it does some cleaning as well - getting rid of the topmost dust layer)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNFUgTJR6jw seems to be the full cleaning procedure

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamping_machine

According to the description of the video you posted, the ballast cleaning machine is then followed by a track laying machine, https://youtube.com/watch?v=tMXfU8blPMM . What an incredible machine!

> they say that "tampering"[1]

I believe you mean tamping. :-)

Looking at that machine I'm amazed that we as a society are not advancing further. We have incredible engineering feats like that, yet at the same time, we have rampant poverty, homelessness, polluted oceans, smog clouds, and thousands of others.

That thing is a moving synchronized orchestra of a mini-factory, carrying it's own inventory and moving on the same railway track that it's servicing/fixing. And here I am, can barely coral a bunch of juniors to fix a basic CRUD app.

Controlling rocks is easy. Controlling people is hard.

The various cults make it look easy.

They target the most vulnerable people.

I’ve known several people who have been recruited into a particular death cult and they are/were very high performing individuals with very stable backgrounds ie strong social network with plenty of resources of all kinds. Confident upper middle class successful entrepreneur types. The attack vulnerability was simply some level of narcissism and desire to belong. These are universal human qualities.

You haven’t described accurately who is at risk from cults, at all. Think of the idea that every religion could be reasonably described as an established cult.

Austrians have a long history of coming up with efficient engineering projects involving trains.

Worth noting though that until more recently they had some challenges focusing on the right goals.

I think that the title suggests that is repositioning the stones (ballast). This video seems to be of the cleaning process:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XWjUZJtR610

I could be wrong, I had never heard of this fascinating maintenance until this very moment.

I love the response:

>BOURLEZ RENOVATION

9 months ago

Why is it?

Tamping is also of critical importance when tracks are first laid; they’re quite uneven at first (visibly wonky) and the tamper evens out the ballast to achieve the extremely smooth geometry required.

I know nothing about this topic at all but, having browsed Wikipedia for a bit, the machine from the video looks very much like a tamping machine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamping_machine (The video title also says "tamper")

No, that's a tamping machine: it packs ballast to level tracks. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamping_machine

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