en.Wedoany.com Reported - LM Heavy Civil Construction uses Gradall excavators for railway maintenance at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), completing tasks such as track inspection, sleeper replacement, ditch cleaning, and culvert installation within strict time windows. The MBTA accommodates over 200,000 passengers daily traveling to and from Boston via rail transit while advancing a continuous maintenance plan, making it a long-term priority to ensure maintenance operations are completed quickly and equipment is removed from the tracks promptly to avoid disrupting passenger and freight services.
As an MBTA maintenance contractor, Paul Sena, Equipment Manager at LM Heavy Civil Construction, stated that weekday work is typically limited to the window from 2:00 AM to 4:15 AM, making efficient operations critical. On weekends, rail traffic is diverted, allowing work from midnight Friday to 5:00 PM Sunday, but crews must still vacate the tracks on time to restore commuter traffic.
LM operates six Gradall excavators, including a new XL 3300V model recently used for maintenance on the MBTA Green Line. At the start of a shift, operators drive the excavator to the crossing, position the attachment over the tracks, and deploy Diversified rail gear, which guides the attachment and enables movement using the rubber-tire undercarriage. To address aging sleepers, the XL 3300V operator uses a Rosenquist SB60 attachment and the excavator's full-tilting boom to carefully remove and replace sleepers, then evenly distributes ballast. Additionally, poor drainage can destabilize tracks and increase maintenance demands, so Gradall excavators are commonly used to clean ditches or replace culverts, and sometimes to rebuild roadbeds and spread ballast using buckets.
Sena noted that the team also uses Gradall excavators with hydraulic hammers to repair direct fixation track sections (where rails are mounted on concrete slabs), including chipping away old concrete, pouring new concrete slabs, and installing new rails.
A Gradall unit can travel on tracks at speeds up to approximately 15 mph, used to tow an 8x20-foot flatbed car carrying materials for culvert replacement and for constructing access ramps to platforms. Some MBTA rail lines run underground through downtown Boston, where maintenance spaces are low, and clearance heights are limited during platform repairs or replacements. Sena stated that the Gradall boom is well-suited for these conditions because its boom directly telescopes overlapping sections rather than using the articulated motion of traditional construction machinery. The boom's tilting function also helps precisely position attachments, enabling correct and efficient work completion.
