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Nine youth compete in the Sunday
afternoon Junior Rail Split contest
[September 23, 2025]
On Sunday afternoon, the Junior
Rail Split contest was held prior to the Lincoln Christening
reenactment and the final Professional Split. The junior split is
held with the hopes of encouraging the younger generations to carry
on the traditions that are needed to keep the National Railsplitting
Festival alive and well for years to come.
This year, there were nine competitors in the junior event.
Those nine were:
Oliver Friedlein from Downs
Lincoln Friedlein from Downs
Kila Robinsen
Colson Chambers from Downs
Eliza Reinhart from Hartsburg
William Dubbelde from Stanford
Haley Huskins from Lincoln
Dakota Baxa from Lincoln
Noah Flowers from Springfield.
Because all of the competitors are pre-teens and teenagers the
splitting requirements were not quite as treacherous as they would
be for the professional split coming later.
Each competitor would draw a number and find the log with that
number drawn on one end. The logs for this competition were four
feet long and were cut in half. Because an appropriate rail is
one-eighth of a log, the young people would be required to only
split four rails.
The rules say that in order to be a legal rail each piece should
have two ends with saw marks.
Before the competition began, there was some setup involved that
included permitting coaches for each competitor to drive the wedge
into the log. Bob Rankin, who along with his daughter Heidi Mueller
oversee all the contests at the festival, explained that this was a
safety measure because in order to set the wedge in the log, one
needs to hold the wedge with one had and strike the sledgehammer or
blunt end of the ax with the other. To avoid injury to the young
people, the responsibility of that task was eliminated in the
contest.
As some of the logs were being
placed, there was one occasion where sparks flew from one of the
wedges. Rankin used this as a teaching moment, saying that the metal
wedges, when hit repeatedly warm and “mushroom” out on the flat top.
Then there can be instances where those projectiles similar to
shrapnel or a bullet spark as they fly off the top of the wedge. He
said that wedges are inspected when contestants arrive, and from
time to time after repeated use, the wedges must have the tops
ground down so that there will be less possibility of the metal
flecks flying through the air.
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This year, the logs being used
for all the contests were walnut. Rankin said walnut is a fine
wood for splitting, but during the competitions, some may not
have been all that happy with the log they drew. There were logs
that cut straight and relatively quickly and then there were
those that seemed to be made of concrete as they refused to part
despite the use of a number of wedges.
The kids worked hard to split their
rails, and it took a few minutes for the contestants to prevail over
the stubborn wood, but in the end, Lincoln Friedlein prevailed with
a time of 7:46.
Colson Chambers came in second with
a time of 8:41
Kila Robinson finished third with a
time of 11:51
[Nila Smith]
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