Come home this evening through Westerleigh to have a nose at whats happening around Westerleigh Junction.
A number of uprights for the OHL▸ have been erected on the piles already constucted from Westerleigh Junction towards Bristol Parkway itself. I could see 4 sets in all but couldn't stop as there was a line of traffic behind me and the road isn't particular wide through the village.
Might take a walk out later as its a pleasant evening to see what has happened east of the junction in the past two weeks.
Well, in the end I didn't take that walk, I took a run over to the station as I espied that a movement from Swindon Transfer to Yate was in progress on
RTT» .
Quite a setup in the station car park, a 'shipping container' cum office, rest room with en-suite wc with the red and white plastic temporary wall barriers marking the route within the car park for the double decker buses to follow. A mobile generator was positioned at the end of the shipping container thingy to provide power for lighting in said container as well as for boiling the kettle and powering the microwave. A second mobile generator was, like the first, sited in a hired-in trailer to provide lighting on the inside of a large gazebo equipped with temporary seating bolted to the car park surface presumably with largish rawbolts. One First Bus double decker was in use and a second, standby vehicle, was parked up in the north end of the car park. This had increased to two dds and a coach when I passed the station on Tuesday 05/09.
However, Saturday nights sleep was disturbed by the continual thumping of the cylinders fot the piles which reverberated through my house and Sunday morning whilst waiting for the bus I was able to view the efforts of the Saturday nights work by seeing two sets of capped cylinders which I presume will be for an upright stantion and a diagonal support where two OHL wire sections starts / finishes.
Tuesday, I purposely traveled on the top deck of the bus and passing through Westerleigh village I could see many uprights in position on the down side only of the line towards Parkway Station.
Yesterday, I detoured on my return home after my midweek visit to the supermarket and parked on one of the overbridges at Chipping Sodbury that leads nowhere except a dead end but could see no evidence of any work being done from the western portal of CS tunnel towards Westerleigh Junction apart from capped piles on the down side only. Nearer to home I stopped off at Wapley bridge, the one depicted in the time lapse video on Network Rail's website, and here there was much more evidence of progress. All the uprights seemed to be in place from the bridge to Westerleigh Junction itself and from the bridge eastwards towards the Sodbury tunnel so the work site at that time could have on the curve of the line not visible from either of the two bridges I visited. There is a third bridge which I can visit between these two but for today I'll be taking a different bus route towards Bristol and I'll report back any noticeable activity on the stretch of the line between Coalpit Heath and Winterbourne.
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