The Baggage Room Basement - Trenching Into The Home Stretch

Notwithstanding that it was rainy and dreary outside, it was nice and dry inside the baggage room basement.  Okay...... so it wasn't exactly dry but it was definitely a lot better than when we started 4-5 weeks ago.....  when the clay was squishy when you walked on it.... when you knew that clay was saturated with an awful lot of water......  and definitely an awful lot dryer than when we first started this project back at the beginning of July.  The sump pumps have definitely been doing the job of de-watering both the bathroom and baggage room basements.  Hard to believe we started 3 1/2 months ago and only on Thursdays with about 4-5 of those Thursdays when we couldn't do any work for one reason or another.   

It was only Bill S, Brad, and yours truly today on the end of the shovels as we continued digging the trenches around the perimeter.  We weren't about to truck that heavy clay outside so we continued piling the clay on top of the rest of the clay.  Hard to believe that two weeks ago (we didn't work last week) when we started that the clay floor was level.  Look at what it looks like now!

Those pails in the foreground have done a spectacular job of helping us get the excavated material out of the basements and getting crushed stone back in.  We've got about 15 pails and we can get a really good chain gang going - when we have the bodies.  And that's our problem.  Most of the lads have gone back to school (good for them!!) so we're down to 3-4 of us - at most - each Thursday.

However, with Bill S, Brad, and me on the end of the shovels, we made quite a bit of progress today as we got the trenching well past the 3/4 mark.  The grey line indicates what we got done two weeks ago and the blue line indicates what we got done today.  The dotted line indicates what we have left to do and, hopefully, we'll be able to get the trenching completed next week. 

Just to give you an idea of what the trenching looks like, here's a shot of the trench along the side next to the track - the swamp side where the water rises and falls in the basement as the level of the water in the swamp rises and falls.  We're well below the bottom of the swamp with our sump pump pit and trenching so water levels in the baggage room basement should be considerably lower than we've seen in the past.

That funny-looking blob that you see sticking out the left side of the trench is drain tile I installed 22 years ago.  Quite a difference in the depth of the trench and drain tile we'll be installing next week!   Here's a good view of the trenching next to the breezeway.  Hard to believe but there's a fair bit of water that comes in from the breezeway side of the station.  Since we've had the sump pump working for 3 weeks now, digging out the clay is a lot easier than when it was saturated with water.

That's part of our stash of plastic pails in the background.  When we get some more help, they'll be put back into service to truck out the clay that we've been piling up.

While the side next to the main waiting room (the side towards William St) has been relatively dry because it partly drains into that basement, the clay still has a very high moisture content.  After we get the the drain tile installed, the excavated clay trucked out, and the trench backfilled with crushed stone, the clay will start to dry out as the water table inside the basement drops even lower.

You can see the two planks we put across the trench to get in and out of the baggage room basement.  Right now the baggage room basement is a construction work site so the standard safety rules apply. 

Just before I left for the day, I took one last photo of that pile of dirt.  That's one humongous pile we've dug out of those trenches, eh!?

Oh yeah, almost forgot.  Just to make sure we stayed on grade with a small amount of slope to the bottom of the trench, I set up my laser level (you can see it in the background on the right) and checked the trenching that we had done so far.  Right on the money!!  Now ain't that damn good!!?