Gluing Ballast

[Deleted]

During this weekends engineering works on the H'Smith & City/District lines at Barking, engineers were photographed, "gluing ballast stones to prevent future failures". This is a first for me. Is this common practise on raised tracks such as the Barking flyover or is it a new technique being tried out?


Martin
 

[Deleted]

Installing continuous slab track in the first place will have made better sense - yes it costs twice as much to install, but lasts over sixty years with very low maintenance costs - Hong Kong's MTR used lots of continuous slab track throughout in order to keep maintenance costs down.

Read this www.britpave.org.uk/RailWhyBuild.ink

[Chris M]

There are situations where glued ballast is better than slab track - the Dawlish sea wall is one example I know of - but whether that applies to this site I don't know.

[Deleted]

Not good when you need to change equipment and you get a spinning bolt then it all has to gunned out

[Tom]

Slab track has its own problems - the trackbed design has got to ensure there is no risk of a baseplate touching the reinforcing bar and causing an earth fault on a track circuit, plus there are additional considerations to providing a drainage channel.

Ballasted track is naturally self-draining and presents less of a problem for track circuit operation - plus avoids the issues of gunning out spinning bolts etc!


In response to the OP - I've seen ballast gluing at Paddington NR before - it looks like this is to help preserve the shoulder and hence the trackform.