Category Archives: Rebuilding the Branch

We’re Going Back up the Branch! (III)

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During December a lot of progress has been accomplished on the Branch. As before, the action is taking place at the railhead near A Bond warehouse and Ashton Avenue Bridge.
As previously described, the work is being done in phases.
1 – Build a single track from the railhead into the new platform road using wooden sleepers.
2 – Reconnect ‘the gap’ where the wall collapse in 2020 severed the line (the civil engineering has been done by contractors but the rails and sleepers have not yet gone back in).
3 – Once the first two stages are done (and when the scaffolding on Vauxhall Bridge has been removed), the Coles Crane will be able to access the site, making adding the pointwork, replacing wooden sleepers with concrete where necessary, and general re-jigging much easier.
The following is what’s been achieved over 3 working days. Currently the working parties are a small number of people, partially due to the confines of the site, partially because there are only so many tools to go around, and partially due to the ability to supervise groups of people. With time, the hope is to be able to do working days with more people.

Day 1 kicked off with a lovely rainbow, and cutting down the contractor’s fence that blocked access to the branch alongside the chocolate path. Then some short rail was dragged out of the pile to be used.

Larry’s forks have been removed again, which enabled Chris to scrape out the excess ballast from the platform area and dump it next to the sleeper piles earlier in the month.
We added track keys to make the new track rigid so that we could get screw jacks underneath the track, followed by the laborious task of shovelling ballast under the rails to give the track some stability and make it level (ish). Did the first new fishplate too!
Once that was done, we dropped the short rail into the North side of the old track, then clipped it up and got more jacks under it.
The last photo in this sequence shows the huge height difference between old track and new. Where the old line dipped down, it now needs to climb up towards the new station. The tops of the sleepers were previously at ground level!
The gradient in this section is currently too steep and a much larger segment will need to be height-adjusted and re-ballasted once the track is connected up.

Larry brought down fresh ballast to be shovelled under the track to support it now that it’s been jacked up. Then the opportunity was taken to dig out the two rails that had been dumped in the cess 10ish years ago. They’d been there so long that they were well and truly buried!

At the end of Day 1, we had half-reconnected the old running line with the new, as well as packed the sleepers and opened up the line again.

Day 2 and 3 were done back-to-back in the Christmas/New Year gap. The first task was to pop out the 10ft length of rail on the North side that we’d been using to jack the track up. Then we took a deep breath and removed the 60ft rail we’d previously laid (due to it having a sharp edge on the inside) and turned the whole rail around to drop it back in. This was quite a challenge given the confines of the site!
Next, a longer-than-10ft-but-shorter-than-30ft rail was dropped in on the North side in the gap and keyed. The final picture is at the end of Day 2, when the 60ft rail had been re-installed the right way around. This process involved a lot of keying chairs and moving sleepers around.

Day 3 must have been busy because I took barely any photos! There was a lot of faffing around dragging various rails out of the pile and then finding that they were too badly worn to be used for the running line. The good stuff was buried further down.
More sleepers were moved into the gap so that another 60ft length could be installed on the South side. The view at the end of the day shows the amazing extent of track that’s been laid so far. It’s much easier to put the track together on the straight, so when the next length of rail goes in, we’ll need to employ the tirfor winch thingy again to start slewing it over towards the road wall and thus the platform line.

We’re Going Back up the Branch! (II)

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Thankfully we have been lucky with the weather recently and have done more work on repairing and rebuilding the branch to A Bond.

EVEN MORE concrete sleepers have arrived and were stashed on wagons. These deliveries have almost finished now with enough in stock to relay the majority of the running line. Bob caught these photos of Crane 32 doing the honours with Henbury ready to tow them away.

A thankless task has been moving the stacks of concrete sleepers which were left on the trackbed in the new station area. The contractors employed to fix the wall of the New Cut and the Chocolate Path were meant to have installed these in ‘the gap’ but for some reason this was not done before the work site was cleared. We need to re-grade this area due to the height difference in the old running line and the new yard area, so the laborious work of moving all the sleepers had to be done by Larry and a few volunteers. Frustrating, but necessary to allow work to continue.
Chris cleared the last few earlier last week leaving the platform road clear.

At the weekend we were then able to drag another 30-foot rail into position at the railhead and begin to hammer keys into every other rail chair to give the track some rigidity. Then, using a turfer ratchet chain thingy we slewed the 60-foot panel to begin making a gently curve towards the station.
The view at the end of the day shows the new curve as well as the height discrepancy between the new track and the old. The old railhead will need jacking up and re-packing underneath once it’s been connected to the new panel.

We’re Going Back Up The Branch! (I)

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The long journey back to the Bonded Warehouses at Ashton Avenue Bridge took another step in the right direction last weekend.
The last train ran here in 2015, when the station was closed to make way for the Metrobus route over the bridge. Since then, progress has been hampered firstly by the delay in building the bus route, followed by the collapse of the wall along the New Cut in 2020. This has now been fixed, but Vauxhall Bridge was then closed for refurbishment for 2 years, which has resulted in the track under the bridge being blocked by scaffolding.


The railway has been stockpiling assets to return down the branch, with multiple deliveries of concrete sleepers over the past year.

Staff and volunteers have been putting the time in, prepping the area around the station now that the contractors have moved out. Track that had been stored alongside A Bond has been pulled out, sleepers sorted into no-hopers vs. reusable ones, and roughly laid along the trackbed.

Last Saturday we were able to take another step forward. More sleepers were moved into position and lined up from the stub of track remaining on the West side of the slip, then Larry dragged two 60-foot rails out of the pile and with much lifting, levering and a gentle tap from the bucket, managed to drop the rails into the chairs.

It may only be one track panel so far, but it gave an immense feeling of satisfaction and progress. The next one is likely to be another 60-footer. The aims here are to build a single line from the railhead to the platform in the first instance, for works trains. This will be followed by relaying the area outside A Bond to allow access to the Barn and the run-round loop. There is some re-grading to be done as the platform area is much higher than the running line, and the old railhead is lower than the new yard, so will need to be built up.
Several passers-by had positive comments while we were working, with the best one being “Does this mean we’re getting our train back?”

Whilst the trackwork was going on, the jungle that had grown in front of the shed was cut back, revealing the track underneath! Also a rare view of the Fox, Walker steam locomotive, LMS Brake Van and Ruston inside the shed. This was the victim of a break-in which resulted in every window being smashed and all the side panels taken off and thrown on the floor. Another fixer-upper!