Night works finish early

Despite poor weather conditions last week, night work on the Manor Railway Bridge finished in the early hours of Friday 6 November – a week earlier than programmed.

Read more here.

View from October

If you haven’t already seen them, aerial images taken in October are now available on our Flickr account.

In this photo you can see work starting on the Southdown bridge.

Night owls!

Night work on the Manor railway bridge is going well so far.

There are now 15 beams in place with a further seven to be lifted in, after which the finishing works will start.

Green bridges

Work has started on the foundations for the Lorton Lane bridge.

This is another of the relief road’s green bridges, which are planted to help blend the bridge into the surrounding landscape and to provide a wildlife corridor. For example, bats like to follow hedges when they navigate so planting along the bridge will help them find a way across the road.

Southdown bridge and Ridgeway bridge will also be green bridges.

Lorton Lane bridge will keep access open to Lorton House, Lorton cottages and the Dorset Wildlife Trust Lorton Meadows visitor centre and nature reserve.

New-t home for local residents

Newts are being moved to a new home during the next few weeks in some of the wetter areas of the scheme. These two will be moved a few metres from where they were captured, to the other side of a protective fence that will keep them out of the works area when work starts on one of the scheme cycleways next year. Work with the newts is carried out by an ecologist under a licence from Natural England.

Relief Road work about to get noisy? That’s missing the point.

Following a local media headline that ‘work on the Relief Road is about to get noisy’ the Weymouth Relief Road team is reassuring local residents that night working to lift railway bridge beams into place near Manor Roundabout should not keep them awake at night.

As we’ll be working over the railway line we can only do the work at night. The point of the team’s news release to local media was to tell residents about the work, so they knew what was happening if they saw lights or trucks moving about in the middle of the night. Residents close to the area have been informed of the works taking place by letter. As with any construction work there will be some noise as the beams are lifted into place, but it should be kept to a minimum – apart from our responsibility to the local community, the planning authority wouldn’t allow noisy work overnight.

Please comment below if you have any questions.

Night work

Night work will start on Monday 2 November to lift the Manor Railway Bridge beams into place.

The work has to be done at night when the railway line is not in use and the power can be switched off.

Read more about it here.

Nearly hot to trot

Work is progressing on the improvements to the bridleway which runs alongside Two Mile Coppice.

Here you can see the drainage layer of chalk, which has reused material from the Ridgeway.

The final surfacing will be Mendip stone or something equally pretty.

Drainage works

Chalk surfacing as part of the base of the road has reached Icen Lane, where extensive drainage works are also underway. 

Drainage for the farm fields in the area is being put in place, and just north of Littlemoor the final earth excavation is ongoing to create balancing ponds.  These will capture water from the road surface, using reeds and other planting to settle out any sediment before the water enters the Broadwey stream.

Railway bridge

Piling for the Manor railway bridge finished in September and work on the abutments is going well.

It will take until spring 2010 for the bridge to be finished. Work next year will include connecting the bridge to the new Manor Roundabout and to the new Two Mile Roundabout.