Ties Per Length of Rail - Model Railroader Magazine
And you can figure out why it 'failed to thrive' then, in less than 15 seconds, just by looking at the two pictures Ed provided. Look at those hard connections -- a moral return to the bad old days of fishbelly rail keyed to granite blocks. As if Stevens' use of wood were only the inconvenient temporary expedient that the English took it for in the late 1820s...gmpullman
Like electric starters, an idea before its time.
Can you imagine the noise? Can you imagine the corrugation?
The thing that made modern concrete ties even tenable was the practical acceptance of Pandrol or other elastic fixation; even then, you get relatively lousy behavior without elastomer pad between the rail and the seat in the tie.
Of course you have to make derailments illegal. Run a flange, even on an unloaded car, over the center of a concrete tie and you'll crack it. This ruins the prestress or post-tension (simple reinforcement isn't really good for repeating sharp dynamic loads) and the tie will join the wind-turbine blades in the 'too expensive to reclaim' landfill...
Bethlehem, as I recall, made a serious push with the steel ties. To my knowledge they never really solved the rust problem long-term. One issue was that the Bethlehem tie is hollow, with ballast contact up inside, and steel is unyielding in contact with ballast. Think of the fun when the ballast in the cribs starts to work...
Some railroads experimented with what were called 'screw spikes' -- Erie was one, and you could still find them in track on the Bergen County Line and Old Main Line. There are pictures of the air-operated "screwdrivers" that installed these... presumably with clutch action on full engagement; the ones I saw went right into square tieplate holes, and in some cases shared a plate with regular spikes. These would not work with concrete ties, unless you cast or inserted wood blocks into them.
The Germans were concerned enough about track shock to research the idea of sprung track, starting around the end of WWI. They unfortunately wound up with the opposite problem: damping. Apparently their efforts ceased when the test locomotive kept bouncing completely off the rails. (But not before they tried to accelerate testing for how to compensate for rail expansion. They electrically resistance-heated the rail, and somewhere in the literature is the fascinating picture of the track bowing vertically up, which apparently is how track fails when the rails are continuously, quickly, and severely heated...)
