Maldon Yard

The destruction has begun!

Unfortunately, we had a bit of previous digger destruction that had to be fixed prior to getting into the fun stuff.

That was successful, and before long, we were into profiling the drain, removing any extra fill and tidying up, ready to remove the headshunt.

A quick glance at the state of the rail foot in the above pic shows why we chose the brutal approach here… it is beyond had it! Thankfully, this is an incredibly limited use area, but it was certainly beyond being reliable for any longer.

The rails were towed away in strings to be dealt with at a later time, however there wasn’t too much left behind to collect.

Once the headshunt was out of the way, we lifted the first section of the 2/3road turnout, pulling apart what we could as we went.

The curved rails were also removing, leaving only just enough of the straight bit to act a headshunt for this weekend’s trains.

The telehander really came into its own for levelling and compacting the ground. We won’t be removing any fill, rather we’ll use the opportunity to raise the track level slightly and just apply clean ballast above.

As part of the work we’ve lifted a few panels from 3 road, up the coal stage, likewise this needed some attention, although not really from a track perspective more for drainage, being steel sleepers in panels its extremely easy to pull up and cart away.

Given there is some decent rain predicted and one of the primary reasons for this work is the poor drainage, we’ve dug some temporary open drains to get that water away if it does deluge as planned.

It’s pretty agriculture, but it’ll do during the work. From Monday we’ll be lifting everything remaining up to the roadway so it can have the same treatment, levelling and grading to allow the water to leave the area rather than keep collecting and causing the track to sink (it’s obviously settled around 100mm from its original level here).

We’ve got several other tasks to undertake while we’ve got this accessible. 1 being to fix the shed downpipes and actually give them somewhere to discharge to (they have just been soaking the track for years), we’ll look at getting some power across from the workshop to our area and we’ll hopefully get a few repairs undertaken on the shed and fencing also. We’ll begin tackling that tomorrow, weather permitting.

8am at Maldon tomorrow, be prepared it could be a little wet, however at least we’ve got some shelter if it is.