As it works the machine travels slowly along the track it has just laid, at around 200 yards per hour. It lays up to twelve sleepers every minute.

Every so often the machine is halted, and men standing by get to work, making checks and sometimes adjustments.

This is the way of construction sites. It can seems to casual observers that most men are just standing around, but they are there so that any alterations or specialist tasks can be done right away. In this way, progress is made.

The New Track Construction Machine approaches the Buckingham Road bridge. The machine itself is blue. Behind it are the wagons loaded with sleepers. At the rear, the diesel locomotive.

Special Train
The New Track Construction Machine is the front part of a special train. Behind it are wagons carrying sleepers.

A white painted lifting body goes back and forth, picking up batches of sleepers from the wagons and bringing them up to the machine. At the back, a diesel locomotive pushes the train along the new laid track.

Finished for now, the machine has now returned to its depot in Crewe.

The machine emerges from under the Buckingham road Bridge.

30 Years

At lunchtime on 15th February, the machine halted at the station. It was the first train to halt at Winslow for almost exactly 30 years.

The last train, a railtours (special service for enthusiasts) Intercity 125 train stopped at the old disused station on 13th February 1993. Not long after their visit, the station was demolished.

The last scheduled passenger train had been even longer ago, on 30th December 1967; over 55 years earlier.

I never took a train from Winslow, but I remember as a child seeing goods trains passing through. I think they were carrying stone or gravel. It was around 1969. I would have been about ten.

There were also a few “Chiltern Shopper” specials, stopping at Winslow between 1984 and ’86.

The train standing at the platform is the New Track Construction Machine.

Special
With the machine halted at the station, the East West Rail project photographer gathered the work crew for a halfway point group photo.

But a couple of hours later when I drove up Featherbed Lane (Furze Lane) at the edge of Winslow, the machine was back in action, laying track under the lane’s old brick railway bridge.

You can just see the pillars of that bridge in the far distance, in the last two photos and beyond the new dark green footbridge.

Here’s a couple of NBW posts looking at the very overgrown new Winslow station site in 2009, and the railway cutting as work began in 2020.

The white part of the machine in the foreground is the lifting body for taking batches of sleepers from the wagons to the machine, ready for laying. Here, it is just returning to the wagons.