Mud Hole removal

Amongst other things, today saw us remove a mud hole near Bendigo Road Crossing. It’d been forming there for years, but this wet winter was certainly making it get worse.

So we removed all the sleepers for a good distance either side of the mud spot and dug everything out.

And of course if you’re going to that much effort, why not replace the sleepers while you’re there.

We kept to a manageable working face and dug down until we found a solid base, interestingly the mud and clay was very much confined to the areas that were visible from above, it wasn’t overly saturated or badly contaminated.

A total length of 23 sleepers were dug out and installed.

Tomorrow’s job will be dropping some ballast, jacking and tamping. We have done exactly this type of treatment previously and found it to be very successful, given our light train weights and relatively few trains, it’s unlikely once a good few inches of ballast are under the sleepers that we’d break through the clay layer below.

Meeting Maldon tomorrow at 8am.