A good turnout for a good turnout…? Groan, sorry!
On Saturday it was all hands on deck for our volunteers, as they set to work on the completion of our last major permanent way task before the Lapland Express Santa Trains start, with the loco yard turnout being finished to a high standard and still allowing time for a pre-Christmas shunt before it got too late into the evening.
The team started the day with the rails aligned roughly using tie bars, and using our new battery track drills, impact drivers and laser levelling device (and a lot of good old fashioned muscle and effort) everything was aligned perfectly, chairs drilled and bolted down, rails fishplated up and the track jacked up, levelled, tamped, levels checked, jacked up again, and re-ballasted and tamped – basically repeat until perfect.
The team were very glad of the use of the new Geismar battery powered tools (utilising Milwaukee impact drivers and batteries, or just the batteries in some cases), a definite improvement on the old petrol driven machines. The hand tampers are still hard work though, but they are at least faster, easier and better than old manual methods. It’s all a far cry from when we laid our first tracks 40 years ago.
All but two of the timbers were replaced in this area, making it a much bigger job than first envisaged, but we were on time, on budget, and finished to a standard many larger heritage railways would be proud of.
Interested in getting involved? Find out more about volunteering here.
