Well we’ve had a successful few days, with the new trackwork tested with the J class on Wednesday and the track outside the gate more or less completed today.
Wednesday saw the last of the track work installed and a temporary headshunt built, just in time to crawl the steam engine over.
We actually did quite a good job in preparing the ground beforehand, and as such, we were able to run over it with only one minor little section needing some ballast and a squeeze before use.
Today’s crew should hopefully have answered the where is the point lever going question, as job one was screwing the long timbers up.
A rough clean up of the area to remove excess material was undertaken to make it a bit friendly to navigate.
Before too long a layer of ballast was spread, while the last of the point timbers were dogged down.
Then, it was onto everyone’s favourite job of breaking up the rail strings into lengths.
The really really poor condition of this rail is evident in these pics, this work is certainly not occurring before time. Thankfully, the newer rail shouldn’t have the same fate, given how much drainage we’ve incorporated into the design.
A good combination of laser level and manual jacking saw everything outside the gates lifted to its final height, before giving it a good tamp, it has come up looking really quite impressive.
There’s a few small dips in the 60lb still, we’ll hopefully get to those tomorrow, however if we don’t it won’t matter at all, we’ll no doubt have some settlement in due course to correct and we’ll fix it up then.
A few high paced action shots of the first gravel going down.
We’ve again opted to keep this as a narrow strip, we’ve got a bit more gravel to spread tomorrow, however it’s more or less done.
It does look a little funny without ballast, however it’s quite adequate for the short term, as we need to move to other tasks for a while, lineside slashing etc…
In completely unrelated matters, a few more pics of Maldon station, with it’s recently repainted and rehung sign, repainted timber work and vibrant roses.
Tomorrow’s crew still have a good list of jobs to tick off before the weekend, a point lever and spreader bars to fit, a few sleepers to replace in 2 road and some security mesh to be fitted under the gate to stop people climbing under, it should be an action packed day so please feel free to join us from 8am at Maldon.
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