Walmer Road Crossing Rebuild

Well, to cut a long story short, it’s all done!

But if you don’t cut that long story short, this is how it all played out…

Thursday morning began early, with an on-site start time of 7.30, and by 7.45, just about every bolt and screw that could be removed had been.

The second the road was shut, we were into destruction mode, and as usual we don’t take any hostages in this process, it’s much easy and quicker to just rip it apart, as it’s all reached the end of it’s life.

It all happened quite rapidly, however after the initial pull apart, the work drops back to mainly just digging for a few hours.

There was still enough going on to keep us busy however, with conduits needing assembling with draw ropes etc…

However the second we had that road-base down and rolled, we were into building track.

The getting everything in the right spots took a bit less time than we expected, so before long we had that whole section of track clipped up and connected!

We did one major thing differently at this point, where instead of putting in ballast then jacking up and tamping, we jacked up first to the final height and then put ballast between the rails only (so as not to bury the jacks). A light squeeze from the grabs then held it all at the right height, ready for the rest of the ballast and tamp.

So at the end of Thursday, that’s what we had achieved, which is quite a bit more than we usually achieve on day one, the practise has obviously paid off!

Today began with some final lining.

We found time to replace another couple of sleepers, closer to the yard before the ballast truck arrived.

We then spread the rock, did a very thorough tamp and whack, before handing it over to the Asphalters at 10am to do their bit.

Seemed a shame to bury it, as it came up looking very very smart.

While the Asphalters did their thing, we did a few odd jobs, such as reconnecting the signal wire and generally just tidying everything up. A little touch up tamping of the approaches, just little things of that nature.

It was certainly nice to have the time to tidying everything up in day 2 rather than needing to come back for a day 3 later on.

And the finished product! It was a lot of hard work, many hours, but it was an absolute pleasure to see the finished product this afternoon. Thankyou to everyone who has helped along the way.