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Since when has relaying the road...

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LE Greys

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...involved putting down a layer of aggregate, leaving it overnight and going up and down it with a road-sweeper the next morning without doing anything else? Oh, and ignoring the layby outside my house that we had emptied especially for the purpose.
 
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Schnellzug

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They're not going to surface it? Maybe they're economising, or it's a traffic calming measure. Rather like bringing back cobbles.
 

IanXC

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Sounds like chippings to me. There will be loose stones to damage your paint work for weeks!

 

WatcherZero

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They will sometimes lay an undersurface before coming back later to lay the top surface.
 

Class172

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Sounds like chippings to me. There will be loose stones to damage your paint work for weeks!
It's worst when you're on a perfectly fast and straight road, but the chippings go on for miles: do you trundle along at 20mph or do you risk having your car sandblasted? :|
 

IanXC

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It's worst when you're on a perfectly fast and straight road, but the chippings go on for miles: do you trundle along at 20mph or do you risk having your car sandblasted? :|

I have been known to take a diversionary route for a few weeks :oops:
 

Mojo

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Sounds like surface dressing rather than actual resurfacing.
 

causton

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Indeed, they've gone for the cheap and cheerful option of throwing loose stones around. You'll see piles of them around traffic islands where cars don't travel as much and don't wear them away...
 

LE Greys

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It might well be something like that, although the sweeping/vacuum machine would be a bit strange. We're still getting people zooming through at 60 (in a 30 limit) or flooring it when pulling out of the junctions, so there are chippings everywhere and dust all over the place. It currently looks like it was laid by John McAdam - which is presumably what it looked like 150 years ago.
 

ralphchadkirk

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Round here they put a layer of tarmac down and then pour chippings on top for the cars to press into the surface - is that what they've done near you LE Greys?
 

LE Greys

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Round here they put a layer of tarmac down and then pour chippings on top for the cars to press into the surface - is that what they've done near you LE Greys?

No tar at all, just dumped a load of chippings, spread them out and disappeared.
 

mbonwick

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No tar at all, just dumped a load of chippings, spread them out and disappeared.

They will have sprayed the surface with bitumen first, so the stones stick. The sweeper truck is then to remove the worst of the excess to avoid damage to car paintwork from flying chippings.
 

WatcherZero

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Round here they first lay a rough layer with large stones quite loose fitting, little to make it stick but mostly just weight of cars work it in, then they come back a couple of weeks later and add a top layer with small stones steamrollerd flat.
 

LE Greys

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They will have sprayed the surface with bitumen first, so the stones stick. The sweeper truck is then to remove the worst of the excess to avoid damage to car paintwork from flying chippings.

They evidently forgot. In fact, you can still see the white lines from before, although some of the chippings appear to have pressed themselves into the old surface by now. The rest are scattered throughout the village.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
Round here they first lay a rough layer with large stones quite loose fitting, little to make it stick but mostly just weight of cars work it in, then they come back a couple of weeks later and add a top layer with small stones steamrollerd flat.

I hope that's what they're doing. Leaving it like this would be worse than before, although why they can't do it properly (i.e. scrape off the old surface, relay the chippings, tar it over and roll it in in one day) is beyond me. This road gets used as a rat-run between Letchworth Gate and Stevenage a lot.
 

Wyvern

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No tar at all, just dumped a load of chippings, spread them out and disappeared.

It's the lack of tar that surprises me. The usual case is that tar is sprayed on to fill up tiny cracks and then chippings are laid to allow vehicles to run over it.
 

pemma

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Cheshire East council sometimes put a thin layer of tarmac over a wearing out road surface and don't even put a steam roller on it. On roads where they've done this pot holes are reappearing weeks after they 'fix' the road.
 

LE Greys

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I take some of it back, there is a thin layer of tar, but hardly enough to stick the chippings down.
 

LE Greys

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Just as an update, there are now white lines on the road, but it still retains its high-friction, noisy surface and there are chippings everywhere, including some that have damaged the cars parked in the High Street. A nice bodge by someone!
 

142094

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Was reading that countries in Europe like France/Germany etc now prefer to put down concrete and spray a thin layer bitumen on top.
 

Eagle

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Concrete roads were fashionable in the UK in the late 1990s, although most have since been tarmacked over (one notable remaining section is on the A35 in Puddletown Forest, built in 1999 and not since resurfaced).
 

mbonwick

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Concrete is a lot more hard wearing, but its much harder to repair as you can't just use a planer - it needs to be broken up with jackhammers. It also produces a lot of road noise.
 

142094

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Concrete is a lot more hard wearing, but its much harder to repair as you can't just use a planer - it needs to be broken up with jackhammers. It also produces a lot of road noise.

Road noise was one of the major factors I believe in some German states going back to using asphalt or spraying a coating of bitumen. Travelled quite extensively on the German autobahns a few months back and the amount of effort it took to rip up the old concrete road was quite amazing.
 

mbonwick

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Indeed, it is very loud to drive on. It's also not very comfortable as you need to have expansion joints every few hundred yards or so.
 

Shrimper

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Parts of the A50 used to be concrete (possibly still are); the noise plus the constant thumping over the expansion joints was a pain!
 

Mojo

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There are a few estates in Bristol with concrete roads and make an absolute racket when I'm within the car, especially when combined with the 'click click' every 2 or so metres as you pass over the joints. Here's just one such example of a road: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Came...=CJBRRiW5MZVbGAoPLiYulw&cbp=12,191.46,,0,8.81

There's also a number of roads about where they were originally concrete and then covered over with a very thin layer. In places you can still see where the gaps between the concrete sections are, and also on a few places (primarily corners) the top layer has worn away to reveal the original concrete: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Stan...KXIYo4wWNj2xPTOjp8I0Wg&cbp=12,156.33,,0,19.82
 

Schnellzug

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Concrete roads were fashionable in the UK in the late 1990s, although most have since been tarmacked over (one notable remaining section is on the A35 in Puddletown Forest, built in 1999 and not since resurfaced).

Mercifully they soon admitted that they'd made a mistake with the new A30 between Honiton & Exeter. That was dreadful when it was first opened.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
Road noise was one of the major factors I believe in some German states going back to using asphalt or spraying a coating of bitumen. Travelled quite extensively on the German autobahns a few months back and the amount of effort it took to rip up the old concrete road was quite amazing.

Probably built to handle Military traffic. That was what they did with the road into town near here; during the war they reconstructed it in concrete with tarmac on top to handle Tanks and heavy vehicles; it meant it lasted a long time but on the other hand it was a real pain when they wanted to dig it up.
 
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142094

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Probably built to handle Military traffic. That was what they did with the road into town near here; during the war they reconstructed it in concrete with tarmac on top to handle Tanks and heavy vehicles; it meant it lasted a long time but on the other hand it was a real pain when they wanted to dig it up.

There were a couple which they'd recently done (past 10 years or so), which they were ripping up due to poor mix of the concrete - locals were playing hell over the disruption again in a very short space of time.
 

starrymarkb

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There are a few estates in Bristol with concrete roads and make an absolute racket when I'm within the car, especially when combined with the 'click click' every 2 or so metres as you pass over the joints. Here's just one such example of a road: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Came...=CJBRRiW5MZVbGAoPLiYulw&cbp=12,191.46,,0,8.81

I'm pretty sure there was a section of that either on the A64 or A42. I remember the racket.

The M5 used to be concrete, the noise both inside and outside was horrendous!
 
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