Maldon Yard

Today’s victim was this turnout in Maldon Yard. It has been largely left to its own devices for 30 years and unfortunately it was really starting to suffer from it.

We haven’t got sufficient time, resources or spare to replace everything, however the area of concern was the section between the blades and V crossing, which is relatively straight forward to rebuild.

However everything we uncovered was certainly beyond repair, this was expected, so we didn’t waste time trying to salvage anything, rather it was just total destruction!

Of all of the rails we removed, each one broke during the process, not surprising given the rust that occurred. However we suspect they might not have been in the best of health to begin with, so they’ve served us very well for 30 years.

A bit of a joint digger effort and the destruction was complete!

We then setup the laser and dug it all to depth, there’s a really nice hard layer of gravel down there, so we were careful not to disturb that.

We did end up deciding to do more than we first planned, near the blades, things looked okay before we disturbed it but they certainly weren’t afterwards.

Before long we’d sourced from our stockpiles sufficient 2nd hand timber to put back in (for these 20 odd timbers we’ve put in, we only recovered 5 – not of good enough quality to reuse either).

This turnout doesn’t conform to any standard plan, so the timbering and rail location is just what works best, however it seemed to be catered for well by our stockpiles of spare parts.

By the afternoon we’d bolted up most of the rail, some needs cutting tomorrow and we’ll adjust the joints so that we can reduce the number that are to be buried (compared to before anyhow).

Hopefully, we’ll also get all of this fastened up tomorrow so we can get it tidied up before the predicted rain on Wednesday/Thursday. Meeting Maldon from 8am.