I understand your point however would you want to spend tens of thousands of dollars to do what you can do with a $100 grinder? And do you want to vaporize contaminants rather than just turn them into dust?

Just saying that technology might not be the best way to approach a bad situation.

I don't know how often hard lead paint or primer is encountered in railroad preservation, but I do remember removing the sealing layer from a house finished with cedar shakes in 1919 and primed with white lead. This was near-impossible to remove with any kind of wire wheel, and abrasive resulted in dramatic amounts of fines (and substantial damage to the raised grain of the shakes which were instantly abraded preferentially when exposed). The only technique that worked was to soften the entire 'remaining' coating, including the amount that had saturated the surface layers of the shakes, and then carefully cut the softened membrane with a sharpened flexible knife. Wearing proper respiration protection.

Accomplishing this with some types of laser would likely be more effective than using more obvious kinds of radiant heat/IR generation, as it would NOT require ablating the surface coating, but merely pulsing the heating shy of inducing actual decomposition. I'd suspect very little practice would be needed to confirm the actual time and pattern needed to accomplish this. Disposal of the removed paint membrane would probably be much simpler than lead-bearing dust, too.

The future is here: Check out this $50 laser: https://www.btmd.online/index.php?route ... d70V8FNYVs

You know the old adage "If it sounds too good to be true, it is"?

https://hothardware.com/news/beware-of- ... to-be-true

https://noscams.info/a-new-type-scam-on-facebook/

Hey, it's on Facebook so it has to be true! They wouldn't post it without checking, any more than Kalmbach would ... oh, wait...

Ruskin said it first, and perhaps said it best:

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.

I can't wait for them to be sold at freight harbor.

Figure out how to routinely replace cross ties and save rust/paint removal to tried and true methods - you'll be way ahead of most outfits materially and financially.

I don't post much because I have little experience in operation or restoration but this topic requires nether.
This may well be the future of restoration, but it will be a few years yet for them to be economical for large scale deep paint and rust removal. Remember when LEDs were only used for indicator lights? Look what we have now! These tools will become better, smaller and cheaper, and in 40 years who knows.

This gadget will be more readily accessible, and I can see it being particularly useful in maintenance work that always involves getting rust out of the way. If there is something faster than wire brushes, solvents, blasting etc it will find its way in to RR preservation as it becomes more widely available. We start seeing it find its way in to auto shops and you'll know its price has come to the reasonable investment level.

I'm still waiting for my Jetsons flying car, dammit.