page_title: Warwickslade Cutting Railway
section_title: Track
hierarchical_section_title: Warwickslade Cutting Railway / Project / Track
caption_attribution_description: Warwickslade cutting: laying the railway
context_page_description: The Warwickslade Cutting Railway was a light railway temporarily built to fill in the Warwickslade Cutting, a straight drainage ditch dug circa 1850 in the New Forest of south-east England, with imported gravel and clay. In 2009, the Forestry Commission decided to obliterate it and replace it by a more natural meandering stream.
context_section_description: The track laying began on 2 September 2009 along a wide, grassy forest track. The track consisted of circular steel pipe of about 6mm wall thickness, welded to steel cross members which were in turn bolted to wooden sleepers. One side was fitted with a steel spike to engage with the next section. Thus, it fitted together very much like a toy railway, using preassembled track sections which are either straight or of fixed curvature. The track laying operation looked a bit like a child’s train set on a large scale. The rails, with sleepers ready attached, came in sections - straight or curved to suit their position. The tube and pin joints fitted together exactly as do the rail sections of the toy set.
  The purpose of the railway was to reduce the environmental impact of bringing so much material on site. The Morooka dumper truck has an engine of 250 HP whereas Alaska thought that they could shift the same 10 tonnes of gravel in a train powered by a Boxer 532DX mini-skid, a tracked vehicle running on the rails, which has a 32 HP engine. Thus the emissions savings would be substantial. There ought also to be less surface damage. The railtrack had a calculated ground pressure, when loaded by a train carrying a load of 10 tonnes, of under 3 psi, to avoid the sleepers sinking into the occasionally very wet ground. Therefore, no ballast was needed.
  The bolts securing the rail to its sleepers have pulled out of the wood occasionally, especially where the Boxer had derailed. This was caused by the weight of the tracked Boxer locomotive pushing down upon the sleepers at a point where they were not well supported. Some of the weight of the Boxer is normally borne by the rails, via its rear steel wheels. Some sleepers disintegrated during the use and some sections needed to be supported by broken branches rammed into cavities under the track. However, as the trains moved slowly, nobody was hurt in occasional derailments and little damage was done. At the conclusion of the drain in-filling, the rail tracks were removed. The project was successfully completed on 19 November 2009.
caption: The pre-assembled sections of the track could be assembled with tube and pin joints like those of a toy train.
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