Today saw most of the material for the upcoming crossing re-build delivered to site. First off a train load of concrete sleepers were taken out from Maldon, having been collected from Muckleford the day before.
Once there the big digger was put to work unloading.
There’s far more sleepers here than we need for the crossing job, however they’ll be needed nearby sooner or later.
A quick run through to Muckleford to collect the rails followed. 4 X 80/94lb junction rails and 2 X 94lb rails were loaded up.
It seemed a very small rail train compared to late last year’s trains.
These were dropped off near the crossing.
Now that we knew the exact rail lengths we are using, we set about measuring the locations we’ll need to cut and join rail, to ensure no issues. We’ll end up with 94lb through the crossing, with long junction rails on either end to get us back to the 80lb.
To facilitate this, we’ve installed lokspikes, ready to use pandrol adaptor’s so we can change out the current rail and install the long junction rails.
All the colours, lines and markings have some meaning…. generally something extremely trivial, but it gives the impression of a very detailed and thorough system.
We even managed to find time to stop using some of the gear long enough so Bazz could attend to a few issues.
Tomorrow we’ll drive in the lokspikes on the Up side of the crossing, before we begin work on aligning the track approaching the crossing, as besides the crossing itself currently being quite misaligned, the approach tracks also don’t really resemble a straight line, so well get them sitting closer to the mark to save a bit of work on rebuild week.
Meeting Maldon 8am or on site shortly after.
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