West Vale Branch
Projects
Steppingstone Lane Bridge Restoration

When I set off for site the car told me the temperature was -6°C (21°F). By the time I had crossed the Ridgeway, dropped down in to the Vale of White Horse and arrived in Shrivenham it had risen to -3°C (26°F). It was a beautiful day: sunny, with a hard frost, and both sides of the bridge had 3" of ice.

There had been no work party in December due to lack of availability (but strangely everyone was available for the Branch Christmas Blowout kindly prepared by Liz and Phil that evening), so we were keen to continue excavating the site as quickly possible. The first problem was extracting the digger from the cupboard where it had frozen solid - we would struggle with frozen ground all day too.

A hole was hacked in the ice and "Bernard", the 3" pump, was set to work draining the site. The were fantastic sound effects when the ice cracked and collapsed under its own weight as the water receded. Within 90 minutes Bernard had finished his work and enormous shards of ice were hanging from the vegetation around the ponds.

 
The ponds after Bernard's handiwork


The ice was 3" inches thick

Phil had been slowly nibbling away with the digger at the frozen ground around the remaining tree stumps in the infill. Meanwhile Chris and Richard tried to rig up a new pumping improvement.

Bernard pumps very fast. So fast in fact that it can be difficult keeping the suction pipe in an effective position. Chris came up with the bright idea of rigging up a rigid metal pipe with one end at the bottom of a sump in the eastern pond, and the other end at a convenient location to be connected to Bernard's suction pipe. Chris had prepared the pipe had been prepared earlier, in true Blue Peter fashion, and all that remained was to bang in a couple of fence posts to fix it to and then strap in position. After struggling with a variety of "Jubilee"-style clips (there may be a British Standard for these things, but you still can't link one manufacturer's clips to another's) the pipe was in position and ready to be tested. It worked very well - in future there will be an awful less adjustment during pumping (and there's a reduced danger of Chris tossing the whole unconnected pipe in to the water).

Bernard's new attachment in situ

Phil finally freed the last two stumps with the digger, mattock and axe. They had to be brought out together because they had become "conjoined" over the years. As a result they were too large for the digger or raw man-power to shift, so the Tirfor winch was rigged up. This made it possible to shift the stumps, but it was still very hard work.

 
The twin stumps freed and being hauled up the bank

By the end of the day everyone was more than ready to go home and have a very long soak in the bath, but before we left we had had our first opportunity to measure the width of the bridge at water level: 17' 10".

The webmaster surveys everyone's
handiwork at the end of a hard day