Falling leaves aren’t just backyard annoyances — they’re major railway hazards. Like other forms of trash, they interfere with train signaling equipment and can react with metal tracks to produce iron oxide and pectate gel. The result: slippery tracks and slow trains.
Cleaning even a fraction of the 140,000 miles of rails in the U.S. is time-consuming and painstaking. But technology is here to help; power washers, vacuums, dry ice — even lasers — have been used to clear the rails and keep things moving. Here’s how they work.
Extra-strong power washers
For the past 20 years, a track-cleaning car called “AquaTrack” has ridden the rails of the New Jersey Transit system. It runs every day from October through mid-December, blasting fallen leaves with 17 gallons of water per minute at 20,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. That’s nearly seven times as powerful as a pressure washer you might use to clean your deck.
Vacuum cars
Anyone who’s ridden the NYC subway will attest there’s no shortage of garbage between the ties. This is more than just an aesthetic issue: Trash causes track fires, and track fires delay trains.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) has sought to keep things cleaner in recent years with VakTrak, a diesel-powered vacuum train from French company NEU that sucks up debris, passes it through cloth filters, and traps it in 520-cubic-foot hoppers. The MTA deployed three of them and saw a 44% reduction in track fires from 2017 to 2019.
Supersonic dry ice
Northern, a rail operator in the U.K., is set to deploy a new “cryogenic” track cleaning system this year. Developed by start-up Cryogrip, specially equipped cars shoot a supersonic, millimeters-wide beam of dry ice pellets at the rails. When the pellets strike the rail surface, they turn into a gas that blasts debris away.
This method comes from researchers at the University of Sheffield, who figured out how to attach the system to existing passenger cars rather than running separate machines. It’s the “first time that passenger trains have been used to clean the track anywhere in the world,” according to a report by The Engineer.
Laser beams fry leaves and debris to a crisp
The New York MTA doesn’t just run vacuum cars. The agency worked with Netherlands-based Laser Precision Solutions to equip two train cars on the Long Island Rail Road with high-powered, close-range lasers that incinerate fallen leaves.
The MTA says the lasers kept 60 to 100 of its more than 1,000 total cars from being taken out of service, cutting autumn-leaf-caused delays by 65% from 2019 to 2020. The agency ordered another laser train in late 2022 for use on its Metro-North railroad.
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