Platform Coping

To complement our recent bridge works. Some platform repairs of the timber coping at Muckleford kept us busy today.

A lot of the coping dates from around 1995/96 so it’s done very well, but we had a few showing their age, with large cracks showing.

So we’ve renewed any failed timber with 2nd hand point timbers. The replacement timbers won’t last anywhere near as well as new wood, but we should still see a good 5-10 years from them. At which time everything will need replacing then anyway.

Believe it or not, with all our fancy wood working gear, all we really needed for this job was a cordless drill (which will happily drill 21mm holes without batting an eyelid), a few spanners, battery rattle gun, hammer and chisel, plus a chainsaw just to speed things up a little. And it took a fraction of the time we expected it to!

All the bolts have been set into the top of the coping to remove the tripping risk and we’ve even tidied up some of the rougher bits, giving a very smart looking edge.

We’ll be down a truck next week while it’s in at the doctors so we’ll be starting at Maldon on Tuesday at 8am, with the exact task yet to be decided (the predicted rain may mean we start work on the pits in the loco shed at Castlemaine).