Rockhopper
Member
- Joined
- 29 Apr 2019
- Messages
- 736
There are hundreds of concrete sleepers piled up around the old Seymour Junction just outside Chesterfield. They must have been there for getting on towards twenty years now.
What a waste of money in transportation. There were thousands in the stack. I believe again they came from Leamside by lorry but hope they went back by rail although they were stacked some way away from a siding for ease of loading.Believe some were used on the refurbishment of the engineers sidings at Millerhill itself while the rest no doubt just went back into the central stores (at Whitemoor?)
Yes. And signalling (the old semaphore signals from Aviemore are now owned by the Strathspey Railway) and footbridges and any piece of useable infrastructure.Do network rail still sell on old concrete sleepers & lengths of rail to preserved railways?
Yes. And signalling (the old semaphore signals from Aviemore are now owned by the Strathspey Railway) and footbridges and any piece of useable infrastructure.
Sadly, the campaigns also now seem to have been sacrificed at the altar of cost and opportunity. The mountains of abandoned scrap materials, including rails, continue to grow and the longer it's left the harder it is to clear.Quite so. If the job is running tight the first thing to go is picking up the old stuff. And it is much easier (and cheaper) to do a ‘campaign’ clear up every couple of years on a given stretch of track. When I was on renewals we always ended up leaving our sites spotless, and we cleared up the last few years’ worth of maintenance detritus as we went. If I had a quid for every spent cutting disc we’d picked up I would have retired by now.
I wonder if it will reach the stage where it could be profitable to clear?Sadly, the campaigns also now seem to have been sacrificed at the altar of cost and opportunity. The mountains of abandoned scrap materials, including rails, continue to grow and the longer it's left the harder it is to clear.
IIRC the line between Boston and Skegness was renewed using recycled track, sleepers and ballast from the WCML about 10years ago.
But quite a lot counts as contaminated waste as it has 190 years worth of dump toilets in it.