My book on railway ballast (post 1) 2026-1-2.
First of all, I’d like to wish everyone a healthy and happy 2026, as a great way to start my very first post on LinkedIn and my website ViaSaxum.eu. I’ve been retired for a year now, but I haven’t been sitting still. One of the things I couldn’t let go of was a question from my manager about what I wanted to “leave behind.” I’d already agreed with a previous manager to document my knowledge, but I kept running out of time. So, in mid-2025, I finally decided to get started with a book, but about what? I’ve had the opportunity to work on many aspects of the railway track, including, without being complete, turnouts, switch point heating, sleepers, point machines, rail lubricators, track on bridges, passage of small wheels, CCTV at level crossings and railway ballast. I chose railway ballast because it represented almost 80% of my work during the last five or six years of my active career at ProRail, de Dutch railway company. I still remember well that in the late 1980’s I was commissioned to rewrite the 1952 ProRail delivery conditions for railway ballast and at the same time was appointed as the secretary of the Dutch chairman of the ORE D-182, of which the end product formed the basis for the EN 13450 Railway ballast (2002). I plan to publish my book at the end of this year 2026. The last couple of months I was occupied with gathering all the information I possibly need for this book, so I have 3 carton boxes full of documents (yes I am a “paper”-man, I need to be able to write on a document, questions and comments, and yes I still use a paper agenda which makes my family and some old colleagues laugh at me, so what). And I also called myself lucky to have kept the diskettes we used in the nineties. The working title for my book is momentarily “Railway ballast, the silent force of our railway track”. I am planning to post once at least every month, but maybe more often. No marketing talk — just practical observations, engineering fundamentals, and lessons learned from real projects. If you work in: railway engineering, track maintenance, asset management, or infrastructure design, I hope these posts will spark recognition, discussion, and maybe even some healthy debate. In my next post (nr 2) I will give some insight into the topics covered in my book.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-book-railway-ballast-post-1-2026-1-2-arthur-kappers-gmu8e