October five day closure

[whole diary]

[bradshaw]

NR^» (Network Rail - home page) are relaying track between Maiden Newton and Chetnole next month. The line will be closed for five days in order to replace 758m of 70 year old track.

https://www.railadvent.co.uk/2023/09/heart-of-wessex-line-to-close-for-five-days-in-october.html

[grahame]

NR^» (Network Rail - home page) are relaying track between Maiden Newton and Chetnole next month. The line will be closed for five days in order to replace 758m of 70 year old track.

https://www.railadvent.co.uk/2023/09/heart-of-wessex-line-to-close-for-five-days-in-october.html

From Monday, 16 to Friday, 20 October, engineers will be working around the clock to replace approximately 758 metres of 70-year-old track between Maiden Newton and Chetnole in Cattistock. The work is required because the present track is outdated and in need of renewal so that it can brought up to modern standards. This will help reduce the number of speed restrictions that are imposed during hot weather, and help to ensure more reliable and smoother journeys.

Good. Though I thought Cattistock was south of Maiden Newton?

Too much to hope that it will help reduce staff shortages which are in my experience the biggest hang up to a reliable service on this line and others from Westbury?

[Mark A]

The line will be closed for five days in order to replace 758m of 70 year old track.

So, that track in use since 1953, and... (Imagines the traffic it's seen, the part it's played in people's lives, the generations of railway staff, the thought that some of those staff will have been in the final years of their career and possibly have experience of the railways as they were at the end of the 19th Century)

Mark

[Marlburian]

... So, that track in use since 1953, and... (Imagines the traffic it's seen, the part it's played in people's lives, the generations of railway staff, the thought that some of those staff will have been in the final years of their career and possibly have experience of the railways as they were at the end of the 19th Century)

Mark

The sort of sentiment that I often have when visiting the sites of Wiltshire army camps (and the railway lines that served them). Oh for a time-machine to whisk me back in time (and return me to the present)! Recently I re-visited the site of the Shrewton Folly target railway on Salisbury Plain which I'd first visited sixty years ago. And when walking over disused track beds and past the remains of stations, I try to visualise them in operation decades ago.

[bradshaw]

Cattistock is 1mile north of Maiden Newton. There used to be a halt there back in the day. Its concrete platforms were used to replace the old wooden ones at Thornford and Chetnole.
Just across the road is the village’s cricket ground where I used to spend many hours playing the game when living in Maiden Newton

[grahame]

Cattistock is 1mile north of Maiden Newton. There used to be a halt there back in the day. Its concrete platforms were used to replace the old wooden ones at Thornford and Chetnole.
Just across the road is the village’s cricket ground where I used to spend many hours playing the game when living in Maiden Newton

Ah - thanks for that correction and further information. I'm getting it confused with the (ex) stations between Maiden Newton and Dorchester West