Turnout

The turnout job has come along extremely well today, it would have been even better except for a digger hose blowout this afternoon… getting the right fitting used up the afternoon, however we’ll be right to go tomorrow.

We’ve used a mix of dogs and screws, based very heavily of what we removed previously and what didn’t need lugging too far to re-use, however we’ve kept them localised to areas to make it easier in the future.

It didn’t take very long at all to get the last of it all fastened up, which was good.

At which point we setup the laser again and set about lifting the straight leg to the correct height, before we covered everything in ballast.

Needless to say that the laser does do a better job than the one eyed kneeling over squint thing, as we managed to get it looking very nice.

It was only at this point we poured enough ballast around to allow this to be tamped, this saved an enormous amount of effort.

It came up very nicely, we’ve even lifted the other side of the turnout to level, ready to apply ballast. It was at this point things broke, however it’ll be an easy first up thing tomorrow, adding more rock and squeezing.

During the down time, the last of the fastenings were removed from the timbers, all were marked for length for potential re-use, tomorrow we’ll stack these up out of the way.

Tomorrow should be quite an easy day, with just ballasting, tamping , fitting of the spreader bars and point lever to go. Meeting at Maldon from 8am