Its A Dirty Job But Someone Has To Do It!

Over my lifetime I have been fortunate enough to have visited many heritage railways and railway museums. Most are run by volunteers who do it for the love of it. Today I became one of those volunteers. As you may have seen from previous posts I have been to the Rocks by Rail Museum on a couple of occasions this year. Its not the biggest museum or the longest railway but it does have a unique fascination for me. I took advantage of a Family membership so that Mrs Woody has also become a member and I decided it was time for me to put something back into railway heritage so I put my name forward as a volunteer. I have no ambitions to drive locomotives but I would like to learn a bit more about the realities of running a railway and be able to say at some stage in the future that I had a part in that project.

I arrived today and was greeted by a great group of long-term volunteers. Once briefed on safety matters I was told we were going to do some work on ballast cleaning which is part of a long time project. In very basic terms the ballast which has become contaminated with fine material no longer drains water as it should. When there are wooden sleepers surrounded by that water retaining ballast they tend to rot and replacing sleepers, so I am told, is not an easy job. However it wasn't that easy cleaning the ballast either. There is some mechanisation with a JCB digging between the tracks but most of the ballast has to be pick axed and hand shovelled out so the JCB  bucket can get to it. I can vouch it is hard work! The ballast is then loaded onto a flat bed wagon which is then moved up the track to near the wash plant. More hand shovelling of material into a teleporter bucket which then takes the dirty ballast to the wash plant which is pure genius. It is an old cement mixer with a 6 cubic meter drum. The ballast gets tipped in, water added, put it on a medium wash cycle and ten minutes later reverse the drum so the ballast is ejected out over a screen and the nice clean ballast is then ready to go back to the track via a hopper wagon. As always the photographs below better explain than my words can! 

No model making tonight - I am shattered but so pleased I have become a volunteer and will be back in a couple of weeks when no doubt there will be further jobs to do and whilst I don't know what they will be it could be more ballast cleaning - Its a dirty job but someone has to do it!. One thing I do know though is Mrs Woody draws the line at manual labour so I doubt that she will be shovelling ballast with me!