Last Saturday saw our railway’s volunteers complete ballasting on our new siding in Downpatrick yard. This involved the loading of ten loads of stone out near the West Crossover which were then brought into the yard by our road rail dumper, which had to then navigate the yard back and forth to reach the new siding which leads to the ‘New Shed’ (which is now well over a decade old).
The location of the new siding means that simply dumping the ballast from a train of hoppers wasn’t practical. Instead, the ballast had to be dropped precisely in small amounts into specific areas, involving plenty of manual labour. Rakes and shovels were the tool of choice for this bit, after which gravity was used to simply dump bigger amounts of stone all around the track. Following each load, our volunteers used our Geismar hand tampers to pack the stone into the gaps beneath the sleepers.
By evening our volunteers had laid ballast all the way up to the shed, with only final fixing of some missing fishplates and levelling left to be completed.
