No public trains at Leadhills & Wanlockhead until Easter
PUBLIC trains will not run on the 2ft gauge Leadhills & Wanlockhead Railway, the UK's highest adhesion-worked line, until Easter 2022 at the earliest.
The line closed at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and has been shut since, the longest closure period in the railway's 35-year history since opening in 1986.
Track manager Alan Mackie said: “The various restrictions meant no work until recently, except for a weekly visit by our site manager who organised a clean-up of Leadhills station site. Work on the extension to Wanlockhead has also stalled because of the pandemic.
“Given our exposed location, subject to extreme winter weather, and remedial work on the main line not being completed until February 2022, it will leave little time for train crew refamiliarisation and rolling stock maintenance to allow us to reopen at Easter, so we're going to be very busy.”
Work is well underway on track panel refurbishment after the excessively hot weather in July and August brought track defects to light, such a section laid by YTS workers in the late 1980s having been built without effective drainage and laid on bare soil, leading to sleeper wet rot.
Vandals cause derailment
Volunteers have been removing one panel at a time, scraping the topsoil off the solum with the line's Komatsu excavator, and laying new clean Cloburn Red 20/40mm stone to a minimum depth of 50mm. Sleepers, rails and fishplates are then renewed as necessary before the panel is relaid, with the works train then moving forward to lay new ballast, which is tamped using the line's CFG BR100 tamper.
“All of this means that we may be running works trains at any time, and we're reminding visitors and local people to stay well clear of the tracks,” said Alan. “We had a recent incident at Leadhills station, in which vandals caused one of our hopper wagons to run away and be derailed, which could have resulted in serious injury. We reported that incident to the police, for, sadly, despite being so remote, we are not immune to the problems faced by other heritage railways in more populous areas.”
Alan also said that the railway is very much ready to welcome further volunteers to help get the line back on track for 2022.
➜ Full details of joining are available at www.leadhillsrailway.co.uk