The P'Way Blog

The work of The P'way Gang (Civil Engineering Department, Permanent Way Team) consists mainly of maintaining and renewing the track work. This is an ideal job for anyone who enjoys the great outdoors. Other tasks undertaken by this department includes tree and lineside vegetation clearance, and also Station, Signal Box and Level Crossing maintenance.

These informal reports are posted in the nuELR Forum. You can view more of these reports, and other interesting posts, by signing up to the nuELR forum at http://nuelr.org.uk.

Select a P'way Blog report to view

P Way report for Sat Sep.4th 2010

"Mama said there'd be days like this" sang the Shirelles, and they were right this Sat. for us as equipment failures made for a frustrating day.
We were working in the same location as about 5/6 weeks ago, (can't remember exactly) under the road bridge at Bury South where we were continuing with replacing sleepers and turnout timbers as required in the sidings area.
One of the timbers was to replace one which we had put in on our previous visit and which did not look too good at the time as we look back retrospectively. Replacing one long timber in a difficult location once is not much fun, but to do it again ????
A shorter one nearer the station was replaced,this one involved issues with a slide chair which refused to be unbolted and 4 sleepers were changed also. One sleeper was on carriage siding no.2 which is the road farthest from the bobbies box, no doubt there are others here under the parked stock but all we could do was the one we could see at the end. 3 were changed on the engine holding road which is the next one. One of these sleepers went in at the end of the siding under the main line protection catch point. This too required a serious amount of digging and thrutching to achieve. I am indebted to the bobby for providing the siding ID references, thank you!

The bance collet holding the drillbit had been acting up earlier whilst drilling regular wood but was no match for the seriously hard jarrah wood forming the turnout timbers and proceeded to disintegrate pretty efficiently whilst managing to break the drillbit at the same time. This kind of snookered us somewhat as all attempts to locate a replacement failed. We just had to do what we could until a replacement is purchased.

Jarrah is an amazingly hard wood and has no difficulty in blunting the best drill. In a long timber with at least 12 holes to drill it is no joke.

The amount of evil smilies in this report should indicate what a frustrating day it was.

Wizzo