Today began with a ditch, some drainage was installed and it was backfilled with Ballast, this should help lessen the water soaking issue this area has experienced.
Lots of time was spent setting it out, checking and double checking, before laying out point timbers.
They looked pretty smart once everything was lined up!
A keen eye will note that given we need to install another turnout immediately off the end of this one, we don’t seem to have made provision for long enough timbers… the short timbers you see in the pic above will be replaced (at least 6 of them anyhow) to support the next turnout – but at this stage for setting up, it’s much easier to lay it out as per drawing and swap them over later before we fasten everything up – we also still need to find a suitable arrangement for the point lever as the old arrangement wasn’t ideal.
However it’s starting to look the business!!
Tomorrow’s crew will hopefully get this largely fastened up, at least the straight legs hopefully and by the end of the week, with any luck, she’ll be done!
Monday saw an action-packed destruction fest, with the 2nd turnout removed – this one came out in kit form very readily, multiple rails broke as soon as they were lifted and quite decent sections of rail foot were just ornamental – it’s need for replacement was certainly not before time.
Today’s crew undertook all the horrid jobs, namely pulling all the spikes, screw and undoing any bolts that didn’t break during the removal – not a fun job, however it’s done now – thankyou everyone.
We then spent the rest of the day correcting the levels, by adding dirty ballast and gravel to form what has already become an incredibly firm roadbed.
Unfortunately, the ground immediately in front of the digger in the pic above has told its secrets regarding why we had so much settlement. About 50mm below surface level is pure plastic waterlogged clay, thankfully railways spread the load well over most surfaces and hopefully with much less water coming off the shed the issue will resolve in due course, however it’ll take a long time to dry out, so we’ll likely be here correcting minor dips for some time into the future.
It’s come up looking quite smart however, tomorrow will see us place a bit of cross drainage in and hopefully we’ll get the turnout laid out, or at least the beginnings of.
Wet… it was wet, so what better fun could we have than go play in the mud!!
The Maldon Workshop building was well overdue for some plumbing maintenance, it was very quickly decided we’d go with new downpipes as the old gal had completely rotted through.
Our smoothing of the ground had actually done a good job of draining the rainfall. However, given this whole side of the shed was dumping there also it did get a bit muddy!
We’ve installed a very no-nonsense stop block at what is now the headshunt end.
And all new downpipes have been fitted and run into the drain – and it works!!! We also installed a third downpipe to lessen the load of the other two.
Next week, we’ll sleeve this cross pipe in an old section of old boiler tube to keep it safe. However, at least this should drain and let things begin to dry out properly now.
You’ll notice how much lower the ground is that shed level, we’ll use this opportunity to correct that and bring it much closer to height, which is why we’re not worried the downpipes kick out at the base, this will largely end up buried.
Monday will, all being well, be an intense day of mechanised destruction, pulling up the remaining track and ground fixing. Hopefully Tuesday sees some new turnout bits beginning to take shape.
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.
VGR Civil Blog 