Description
Thanks to the generous contributions to our Covid-19 appeal from our supporters and the public it has helped us pull through the dark days of the lockdown period. And we can’t thank you enough for this. It is wonderful to have such support.
Now we are up and running again, the income we are earning will help us through the rest of the year, but this does not make up for the income we have lost for the best part of the season from April to July.
Every winter we undertake all the heavy maintenance needed to keep the railway in top condition, and for the last 5 years we have embarked on a major programme of upgrading the sleepers that support the rails, completing about a ¼ mile of the railway each time.
The biggest part of this project is the cost of the sleepers, and with money being very tight we are in real danger of having to stop the project this winter and lose the momentum that we have built up. So we are again appealing for your help – can you sponsor a sleeper so we can carry on with our work?
We use azobe hardwood sleepers for longevity. These have already been used on the mainline railways and so we are effectively recycling them when they are replaced with more modern concrete sleepers. They should give us between 30 and 40 years’ service. Each standard mainline sleeper costs us £30, but by cutting them in half we can get two sleepers from each one we buy. We need a total of 200 mainline sleepers to make 400 of our own for this winter’s work.