Two teams in action

Monday 2 September 

With work at Stanton on the downward slope we spilt into two teams this morning. Alastair and Roger went to Stanton to continue the brick laying while Stuart, Dave and Nigel went to Toddington to try to trace the gully drain runs at the station. 

The Stanton work was all on the down side, with the cess extension pipe headwall and the outer wall over the inlet pipe being the focus of attention. 

Roger building up the headwall 

Making a start around the inlet pipe 

As the taper bricks used for the brick arch are in short supply, it was decided to shape normal bricks to fit round the pipe. This is the 'usual' way we work round pipes, there is no need for this wall to be load bearing so it won't be an issue.

Shaping round the pipe 

Bricks cut and shaped around the corner 

Extended down side cess headwall completed 

Progress by end of day 

Alastair in mixer mode 

The Toddington expedition proved, as usual, to raise more questions than find answers. This was intended to be a quick visit to aid some works that our Construction and Maintenance (C&M) team are looking into. After spending all day looking into holes we now know where water gets in to the system and where it comes out - where it goes in between times is a mystery still. 

Nigel and Dave get the rods ready 

The sonde is first in to check the track of the pipe 

The sonde proved that the pipe is running straight down the roadway, but, it came to halt at the south end of the station building when it hit a suspected partial blockage. Next we checked the nearest 3 gully's to the south, that just confused the issue as the outlets ran in different directions. 

Gully drain 2
Only an outlet to the south 

Next move was over into the cess where there's a pipe running into the chamber next to the barrow crossing, this is the suspected outlet. 

Suspect pipe top left corner 

We then checked if any the car park drains ran out from the suspect pipe in the cess... 

Checking a junction chamber 

Inside the junction chamber 

Second cess chamber with the inlet from the car park 

Dave an Nigel show the lids who is boss 😊

This proved that they ran into the next chamber south. That only left the possibility that the 4 station station gully drains run into the first cess. To prove this one way or the other, a bucket of bio-degradable florescent dye was run into the drain. 

Dye ready 

Dye in the gully 

10 minutes later dye comes out of the suspect pipe 

We did the dye test from 2 gully's and that confirmed they outlet into the chamber. Given the direction of the gully outlets it looks like there could be another junction that has been tarmacked over. Running the rods up this outlet pipe showed that it goes beyond the gully drains (that is if the run straight). We need to come back and run the sonde up the outlet pipe to see where it goes, we ran out of time today. 

If the outlet is straight, then it ends here! 

This information all needs to be mapped and another visit made to check the last few bits. We were going to CCTV the pipe run, but the camera kit has developed a fault, so that idea had to be shelved.