Re-railing

Today’s effort was again a great success, albeit somewhat chilly at the start with a light frost, reminding us its still winter.

As we hadn’t undertaken any preparation this side of the bridge, a lot of today was spent getting the old rail free. This is the worst part of the job unfortunately, but it’s just got to be done.

In no time though we’d reached the end of the curve, the rails has been swapped and clipping up was full steam ahead.

We’d initially planned to get to the end of the curve, to match where the 80lb ran out on the high leg, but we decided that given we’d achieved that well before lunch, we could probably manage another few lengths.

To give us a joint stagger between legs (these rails aren’t all exactly the same length, so trying to get them square would be a power of work, with no real gain) a 14m rail was installed, but that resulted in the next rail having a joint exactly in the pedestrian crossing! So, two 14m rails were installed, giving us the equivalent of the same desired stagger, without the nuisance of a joint in the crossing.

Here we’re bolting up the first length on the down leg past the curve, we’d re-railed the down leg of the curve some years back in 80lb to strengthen it, so it was nice to be able to bolt straight to it.

As we were feeling ambitious, we extended our re-railing to take us through the pedestrian crossing, which inevitably meant digging it out.

Thankfully a very quiet crossing, so we didn’t inconvenience too many people for the hour or so the crossing was open.

By day’s end we’d clipped up all the concrete sleepers and cut the closure rails into the 60lb, one was easy and one of fell exactly 2 inches on the wrong side of a 60lb joint, so a half length of 60lb was cut in to give a good closure.

Today saw a further 315m of rail installed, bringing the weekly total up to 1064m (we did a calculation on site from memory but we underestimated, so gang we did even better!). That’s a massive effort for only one week! Only many thousand metres to go now!

Tomorrow, we’ve got a good list of jobs to complete before we’re ready to allow trains over at the weekend, lots of sleepers need changing and a good amount of tamping is required. Meeting at the Brown St. Pedestrian Xing from 8.15am.