Toddington Refit

 Tuesday 8th Feb

All hands on deck now to get the new Toddington pointwork reconnected to detectors, signals, rodding, etc. So five of us off there with the diesel railcar trailer loaded for action.

There's quite a lot of work to do here now that the new  pointwork has been re-positioned.

John P and Neil C concentrated on refitting the FPL (lever 11) , stretchers and angle cranks , all of which needed a fair amount of drilling- some through steel and some through sleepers. 

We had taken the precaution of bringing the portable generator with us but we didn't need to use it as there  was , luckily, a mains connection in the adjacent pit and we had a nice long lead to oblige!

Note the multicoloured environment with the brand new yellow  stretchers! Note the insulated joints for track circuiting.

Meanwhile on the platform 2 side there was Malcolm W, John B  and myself dealing with the metal plates for mounting angle cranks onto concrete blocks which have been roughly positioned and need fine tuning to get everything in the right position .

Then followed the problem of getting the point rodding stools (most of which had been removed) back in perfect alignment relative to the track. So, forward with our hightec  equipment -- a large plank (remember the film with Eric Sykes and Tommy Cooper) with attached locating devices! This was very effective.

Getting the alignment of this angle crank to match up in both directions is proving a bit tricky with the mounting plate perilously close to a drain cover.

 

Most of the  concrete rodding stools that were removed to facilitate the track replacement have to be repositioned with freshly dug  holes in the ballast.

Work will continue with more of our colleagues tomorrow and Thursday . More serious shovelling to look forward to!

Curly