Today began with coffee drinking and pointing… weighing up the pros and cons of moving the point lever over to the south side of the new turnout (rather than the previous north side), an executive decision has been made in this regard and hopefully we’ll be able to treat you to the exciting outcome shortly! (We hope your as excited about these trivial matters as us…)
Job one was a final check, before cutting in a closure for the straight leg.
Once we had one continuous length, it was a string line and eye to get that dead straight, which seemed to happen quite easily.
Before too long we’d fastened up the up side straight leg and we were ready to begin the down side leg.
In fastening up, we used what we had available, it’s a mix of plain spiking, pandrol plates and flat no-shoulder plates, which will annoy the future maintainers, however without spending a fortune on bits, it’s a big improvement over what we had before!
Once the straights were both firmly secured, it was onto the curved lead. As we’ve used up all the complete turnouts we’ve removed as units, this one is a bitza, made from odd lengths of rail, hence why every leg required a closure to be cut to suit, however it’s very little additional work really as it’s all still assembled as per the standard drawing – just with a few joints in different locations to suit the rails we had.
A considerable amount of time was spent ‘tweaking’ the curve with jacks and blocks of wood to make it smooth – the drawing provides offsets for getting this right, however it just wasn’t quite good enough on those alone – they rearly are apart from when using new material, so a few mm’s here and there quickly brought it into a very smooth and appealing curve.
We’re very proud of the end result. We’re yet to complete the fastening down of the curved lead and the inner curve. However, we should comfortably accomplish this tomorrow.
In something completely unrelated, one aspect of our railway is often overlooked is the platform adornments.
Currently Maldon station is showcasing some rather spectacular roses which are worthy of a mention, as are the volunteers who keep them in good health. It’s these things that really do make a big difference, we’ve got quite an area around Maldon that would lend itself to a few green thumbs, please let us know if you’re interested in getting involved.
Tomorrow’s crew will be meeting at Maldon from 8am.
VGR Civil Blog 