Head of steel

Extending mainline at Maymorn

Track is being built at Maymorn station, including our future mainline and loop tracks, along with points and yard track leading into the rail vehicle shed.

We've made a start on building our future mainline track at Maymorn. Track has reached the 150-metre mark and plans are afoot to extend it to the Kaitoke end of our Maymorn site.

Recent posts

Excavator forming truck crossing at Maymorn

Work progress 14 December 2013

Today we had an excavator on site to form a truck crossing just to the Upper Hutt side of the pedestrian crossing. House trucks and other over-dimension loads request to cross both KiwiRail and our railway lines on a reasonably regular basis — and we had a few tasks to complete before the next crossing can take place. A low concrete wall at the base of our security fence needed pouring. Hard fill had to be placed between our mainline track and the wall, and a ramp from the wall down to the driveway level.

Hugh and Lionel manouvre rail into position through the pedestrian crossing

Track extension reaches pedestrian crossing

In the past few weeks we have further extended our mainline track eastwards, finally reaching the pedestrian crossing opposite Maymorn Tranz Metro station. Despite some fairly awful weather we made reasonable progress. The 50kg rail required cutting, drilling and straightening, and the TPR sleepers needed adzing true and reboring. A large pile of ballast near the crossing was both a blessing and a curse - in that we had ample ballast available, but a good amount had to be cleared out to permit sleepers to be laid.

Volunteers extending our mainline at Maymorn

Mainline extension June 8th

Our mainline at Maymorn was extended a further two tracksets on Saturday 8 June, now just 10m shy of the pedestrian crossing gates.

We're keen to shift the rake of Yc ballast wagons along - to give a little more running track length ahead of our official commissioning of shunt loco Tr189 on 22 June.

All photos by Glenn Fitzgerald

Ballast wagon Yc2289 standing on yard track on 5 January 2013.

Mainline now connected to shed yard

We have been working on connecting our mainline to the shed yard, including a double slip and two turnouts, all in 91LB/yard rail. The double slip has been extensively rebuilt from a donor asset purchased ex KwiRail during the Wellington rail upgrade programme. Both turnouts have essentially been built from scratch from individual components. The 91LB rail has been cascaded out of our mainline to build the turnouts.

Lionel, Peter, John and Colin working on double slip and road 2 turnout on Saturday 24 November.

Track work - 24 November

Good progress had on Saturday with our current challenge - to connect up our mainline with the rail vehicle shed yard at Maymorn. We split up into teams - sorting and moving 50kg rail for mainline, loop and yard work, adding sleepers to the frog set of the double slip, and rail work associated with our new road 2 turnout.

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