Drains

With all the rain we’ve had lately, the blocked drains along the line are becoming very obvious.

We set out to remove a kinked joint near Rowe Street crossing, which we had comfortably achieved by morning tea.

The kink is quite obvious here, with the image below showing the smoother joint and process of lining.

This has been on our list for a while, it’s nice to tick off these jobs that’ve been hanging over us for a while.

After the lining, the nearby drains came into our sights.

The culvert on the Down side of Rowe Street was well overgrown and heavily silted, some careful digging cleared the way for water.

While in the region we improved the side drains, which had also silted up, not allowing water to drain from around the sleepers.

We continued that right around the curve to near Maclise Street.

Around at Maclise street we tackled the UP side culvert, which turned out to be completely block for about half of its length.

The run away drain for the water was filled in some years ago and since then there hasn’t been any real drainage around the crossing.

Lots of prodding, poking and scrapping was needed to get any water flow!

But eventually flow it did. Quite an exciting moment after almost two hours of battling!

It’s never a real day on the track without at least one funny story, Tony’s turn this time.

This pic captures him in free fall on his way into the drain pit, after somehow loosing his footing (he was already kneeling so we’re not too how he did it). Thankfully he seemed to have a good laugh despite being soaking wet!

After lots of hard work and a cup of tea to celebrate we ended up with a functioning culvert. We still need to finish the away drain but that may need to wait until the ground dries out enough to get the digger in, at the moment there’s enough fall to drain near the track.