Return to Stanton

Saturday 6 April 

Back to Stanton again to continue building the chamber walls in the 2 excavations on the down side cutting crest. These new chambers will provide access for ongoing maintenance of the crest drain and divert the flow from a land drain into the cess and stop the pooling next to the track.  

Michael and Roger set up camp for the day 

Start point on excavation 1 

Start point on excavation 2 

Once the first mortar mix was ready Roger and Michael got started on the bricks. As there wasn't much else to do for a while, Stuart and Alastair went up to the Aqueduct to check on the down side slope of the cutting following the heavy rain over the last couple of days. 

Michael starts on the back wall 

Aqueduct Inlet 

Inlet pipe on the right, crest drain stub in the wall at the top of picture  

The inlet grille on the aqueduct box section had partly blocked with vegetation washed down the stream, this had raised the level so that water was flowing back out of the channel into the northbound crest. Not really what we want to happen. 

Picture: Alastair 

A scrape with rake soon got the water flowing and the level dropped by about 75 mm. This will need monitoring for a while as it may and turn into an ongoing issue. One possible solution will be blocking off the crest drain stub. 

Water level reduced  

Meanwhile back at the work face progress had been made. 

Chamber 2 Crest/land drain 

Chamber 1 Crest/Cess 

The next diversion task was to replace a cracked lid on the up side cess where ballast had been tipped for loading into the Dogfish hoppers. The crack was so bad that the lid could have failed if somebody had stood on it.

Left hand lid cracked 

When the railway drainage was installed over 100 years ago the GWR seemed to follow a set pattern, in cuttings like at Stanton the cess drains had catchpits (chambers) every 30 yards on both the up and down sides. Since then maintenance work by the GWR and British Rail has introduced some anomalies, this and the lack of reliable drawings makes for a lot of investigatory work. For example, 2 cess drains run on each side from the aqueduct to Culvert 11A, a distance of 660 metres. In the middle of ballast tip site there should be chamber on the up side opposite one on the downside, as for the rest of the distance. But an exploratory dig on Monday and again today only unearthed what looks like drain blocks (hollow pre-cast concrete blocks that let the water pass through), no lids in sight.  

Drain blocks 400 mm down under the ballast 

Rather than continue digging in both directions to try and locate the chamber, it was decided to abandon the search and try again by running the drain camera through the cess pipe. While we were in the area another wet patch was spotted on the down side cutting slope, more investigation ensued.  

Looking for the source of the Nile (or the ground water) 

We found what seems to be a ground water spring towards the top of the slope, the water is pooling in the cess here so that will need to be dealt with before the rainy season gets under way in May, June and July 😊 

5 minutes flow filled a hole in the cess 

Last call for the day was Culvert 11A and B south of Stanton Yard, to see what 2 days of rain had done. Water was pooling at both sides of the embankment each side of 11B. We are looking to do some work to alleviate this in the near future, funding permitting. 

Standing water on the down side at Culvert 11B 

It's strange how we go out to do one job and come back with 2 extra, another mystery of the drainage world 


STOP PRESS - Terminology page added with some of the basics explained. More will be added as and when time permits