A Bit of Burying

Tuesday 26th Feb

Eight of us at Broadway today with plenty of shovels and mattocks to do some pipe and cable burying plus the concreting of the signal wire stakes that we positioned last week.
So firstly off to Childswickham Bridge where Steve had previously dug us a channel with the JCB across to the horizontal pulley. This for the burying of a 3" dia plastic tube to protect the signal wire going across the track and adjacent access road.

Once buried  this tube should withstand the rigours of passing service vehicles in the future:

A fair bit of shovelling required to replace just a few JCB bucket loads!

At the advanced starter signal opposite, more shovel-work required to dig channels for burying the cables to feed the signal from the adjacent cabinet:

Two 20 pair cables continue on in front of the signal towards the station and the cables to service the signal are routed to the back. Good job there were plenty of us to shift the ballast and roots!
At last, most of the cables are into the cabinet. Neil C is going to have a lot of fun stripping the ends of these for connecting in!

Having got all the cables buried it was then possible to start dropping the two 20 pairs into the troughing along the side of the caravan site fence and placing the lids on:

All beginning to look quite neat now.
It has turned out that there is quite a lot of walking involved at the moment between the signal box and the two signals - we haven't got the luxury of the diesel railcar this week to taxi us and the hardware. Although we managed to reverse the blue pickup some way up towards the home signal to do the stake concreting. We had the petrol mixer on the back with the aggregate and barrowed the concrete along in stages. Some tweaking of stake alignment was required - but we have now fitted all the pulley wheels and the wire in place:

Moving on up to the Home signal there were more channels to dig to bury another set of cables and feed them into the line-side box. Plus a protective plastic tube under the track to carry track circuit feed wires

In fact there are now eight separate cables going into this line-side box - 4 for track circuits, 2 for signal lamps, 1 for the detector and a 20 pair termination - again Neil C is going to enjoy connecting this lot!

And at long last here is the Home signal in all its glory with the scaffolding removed:

It makes a good leaning post after a hard day's work.

A coat of silver paint has been applied to the two pieces of protective rail "crash barrier" at the horizontal pulley to make them more visible:

And the limited access warning signs attached to the posts at each end of the adjacent  caravan site fence:

Curly