Roads/Tracks

Whether you can use culverts or not is debatable. B4RN used to advocate them at one stage as they were free, now it seems they are frowned on.

This is the B4RN advice from our 2015 Guide

“Road crossings:

The best value strategy is to cross under roads using farm culverts. B4RN duct run through these should be protected by passing it through a length of strong agricultural water pipe or similar. Some larger culverts or streams with large volumes of water and potential for large debris may need steel pipe which B4RN can arrange.”

This advice was never updated, although eventually we did hear mutterings that culverts were now frowned upon.

So we made our own rule that the core route shouldn’t use a culvert, but spurs could if there was no simple alternative.

A culvert for a spur seems a sensible route, especially the ones already carrying a farmers pipes or cables. And there are a variety of culverts - they are not all drains. Some are redundant drains, some are farmers private routes for other pipes, some are very large, we have one that is an underpass for cows

Impact moling is the usual method of crossing a proper road. Details on separate page.

For a more difficult road crossing where you can't do a linear route from a hole one side to a hole the other side, you may consider the directional drill. This can be steered, so that it can dive down one side, flatten out and come back up the other side of the road. This can also be used to get under a river or a canal. Details on separate page. This is a fairly rare option because it is 3 times the price.

(Sometimes the term directional drill is used when people actually mean impact moling)

As a last resort you may have to go for the most expensive way across the road, an open cut. The cost will escalate once traffic lights, road closures, come into play. But it is an option. This is on this page,

Footways can also be dug up.

Tarmac is available in bagged form for domestic use and is a straightforward DIY job. Just put it in and somehow compact it. Can be a bit tarry, but not too bad. Best in warm weather.

You may not think this type of work is possible with B4RN. About a hundred yards of tarmac work in the Caton & Brookhouse B4RN area.

You can see some challenges there, some dense housing. The tarmac makes a N-S link, field to field, across Brookhouse, the group of houses on the right

Farm tracks

They range from the odd one that you could just moleplough through (extra care needed to flatten it afterwards) to posh ones that required the impact mole approach. What you are able to do depends a lot on how valued the track is to the farmer.

And a host of techniques to invent for the others.

A digger could be used on some of the rough tracks to embed a metal pipe and then putting a lot of effort into leaving the track in good condition.

A good method with a solid concrete track is to angle-grind a slot 2 inches wide in the track and put a scaffold pole or alkathene in. Postcrete concrete to fill the slot. Bit of alkathene each side to get down to a proper depth.

With a track that is made from two concrete strips, we sometimes use the ‘3 prong approach’ - use a digger to dig either side of and in the middle of the track and push a metal pipe through each of the halves.

Some might be easy because the farmer has his own route under the track that we could share.

In most cases the track is pretty much usable throughout, at most something like a half hour closure.

Left

You have to cross this concrete track

Your choice.

Go under where there is grass in the middle by digging down in three places and working your way under.
Cut a section of concrete out with a grinder, concrete to backfill
Lay a metal pole across where the concrete ends and add more concrete thus extending the track by a foot
Dig straight through the rough stuff below the track with a digger.
Inspect above the track, it may just peter out into field

Sometimes you wish you had a rake to make this absolutely perfect, That was ploughed.

Digging straight through

A narrow bucket will be necessary. It needs to be neat, but it should leave a slight hump, or otherwise it will be a dip in two weeks time

With a track with barriers either side manoeuvring is difficult because you would like to dig along the trench.

You can't reach the middle section properly, you will be scooping at right angles to the trench, it may need a bit of manual work.

That is probably what you would do, but reaching over from the fence side would give a better result.

You would normally be putting an outer duct or a metal pole across the track section. And in this case probably some protection all the way across from field to field.

Cutting concrete

Alkathene in a 50mm slot. The track is usable throughout the operation. Use fast setting concrete and the whole job takes one person 2 hours.

If the existing concrete is already cracked up, then the job may be possible without an angle-grinder.

And the farmer ends up with a better track than what he started with.

It can be a dusty job, and you may need water on hand to cool the blade.

No need to mix concrete specially. A single bag of Postcrete or similar emptied over the crack, sprinkle with water, sets in about 20 minutes. Done

And we are less organised than this lot, we usually find we have no water container, and so we use the empty bag to fetch water from the nearest stream.

Other variations

Special slabs that cover Dent Car Park were lifted out by digger but had to be carefully replaced by hand

Easier done by hand than getting a digger to this distant place.

Cobbles could be lifted here and helped back in place with some delicate concreting.

We weren't allowed to cut this one. So we employed the three scoop method. Using a digger to make 3 large holes, one in the middle and one either side. Then it is a fairly easy job to manually get through underneath the concrete sections.

The farmer did this one himself, we are not sure how. He somehow burrowed from both sides and eventually knocked a bar through.

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