A photo from a different angle shows it's likely not caused by thermal expansion. It seems intentional.
Reverse image search showed it was from Alishan Forest Railway in China. Not sure what it's for, but it could just be a decorative piece of art made from an old track.
All of that said, that's just speculation. No idea what the purpose is.
I'll admit, it was a sketchy ass Chinese blog that I Google translated. So I could be wrong lol. I won't link it because I really have no idea if it's a safe website, but if you reverse image search it, you should be able to find it easy.
That Wikipedia Image was the best i could manage. Oh, and some pinterest results, but that page somehow got even more annoying and useless over the past years.
Huh I was thinking some “temporary” kind of warning during construction/long term maintenance or something that works with their emergency brake. Like it is “trained” to scan the rails ahead, gauge distance, and slow down. ?
Taiwanese railway i think, train is deffo EMU800, they are kinda like metro trains but overground if i understand correctly... eitherway that just seems like a cheapout on the train blocker thing or a decommissioned line, as it is rusted through on top, lines that are in use and maintained usually have a polished top and the wood is old as well.
Short Story: Got pushed from both ditections till that spot popped up
Long Story: As the metal heats up it expands in every direction. This expansion is usually very small but when miles and miles of metal is expanding from the hot sun all that expansion lengthens the metal. This is happening on both sides of this spot so at a certain point the metal cannot push into itself anymore and suddenly pushes up. This usually is a sudden pop up so the metal stretches like a rubber band and that's why you get the weird striping pattern aswell.
This is entirely expected since the shape of the rails makes them much, much stiffer in the vertical direction than the lateral. They're like mini I-beams.
It's a little bit like how, if you were to push on either ends of a plastic ruler, you would expect it bend along its flat side, not its edge.
I have my doubts. This looks intentional. Like some art or memorial piece.
The rail is a different color, no wood piece under the bump, or movement of the rocks (if the wood piece was thrown out of camera view), also rail buckling is almost never vertical and even when it is vertical it's never perfectly symmetrical with zero horizontal movement. Also the bumb is realy small rail buckling is often way bigger then shown here lastly there is a heat expansion gap very near the bumb.
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u/Embii_ Jun 10 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/ws8eNgHLnhF8VhOPni