Who can I complain at?

fudgeukraine

From the link provided earlier:

Tamping Machines
Track is made up of three parts – the metal rails, the wooden sleepers that sit under the rails and the ballast which is the crushed rock laid to form a bed for the railway.

For the track to work properly, the sleepers need to sit firmly in the ballast. When track has been heavily used or has been re-layed, we need to remove all the voids & gaps in the ballast so that the sleepers do not bounce up & down as the trains pass over the rails. Tamping also puts the track in the correct position. This allows trains to run over the rails smoothly which reduces noise & vibration.

To do this, we use tamping machines. They are about the size of a normal engine and sit on the tracks. They use hydraulic “fingers” to vibrate the ballast which removes all the voids & gaps and enables the rails to be pressed down.

Unfortunately, tamping machines are very noisy. Not only does the tamping process itself produce noise, there is also the noise of the tamping machine and the track alarms that give safety warnings to workers. Sometimes, we need to use two or more tampers or other equipment as well.

The noise levels vary depending on the circumstances. Open countryside allows noise to travel further than hills. Frost makes the ground hard which means that noise cannot dissipate into the ground. Fog means that noise cannot dissipate into the sky.

Tamping machines travel about one mile on a job. This means that, on average, they pass by the homes & business of thousands people. Most tamping jobs have to be done at night so that they do not disrupt train services. Usually, this affects our neighbours for one or two nights.

We are not able to give advance notice to the people who will be affected by tamping machines. This is because it is part of our regular maintenance work which takes place every day & night of the year. This makes it impractical to give advance notice to all the people affected by every job.

National Helpline 08457 11 41 41


Unfortunately it is a fact of life that, chosing to live near a railway line means that there will be maintinence. At least though it should only be for a couple of days.