Bringing An Abandoned Gold Mine Back To Life: Part 5 of ?

what we're working on here is a rail switch and i'll explain that in a second the switch is going in right at the 1600 in order to have service going off to the drift to the right where the new work is going to take place in other words our initial drilling and blast [Music] [Applause] [Music] in order to install the switch we have to first cut out the old section of rail before it can place the new section and it's got the arm of the switch running off of it and sometimes it takes a little bit of tinkering and cutting to get it to fit perfectly it doesn't always fit just perfectly and smoothly as we would like working with hundred year old rail we often have to fabricate things on the spot so here they're creating a connector otherwise known as a fish plate for the rail so they just finished working on this fish plate he's just banging out some imperfections now and then you know dip it in the water and cool it down now they're just tightening down the bolts on the custom fish plate to connect the old section of track to the new switch the next step in the process is to bend the rail below the switch in order for it to be able to accommodate the new turn you're creating to accomplish that we use a tool known as a jim crow which he just put into place there and a lot of muscle it literally bends the rail to your desired shape if you look at the end of the rail you can see it bending when he pushes down on it see what i mean the rail is yeah it's heavy and thick but it's also surprisingly flexible the metal especially in rail that's more than 100 years old has a memory as you've got a beat on it with a hammer after you've bent it to avoid having it snapped back into place after you remove the jim crow when you're bending the rail for something like a switch you're gonna have to bend it in more than one place so it's a good job for the new guys or your strongest guys because it's a lot of work we've got the victaulic connectors in is it for connecting the compressed airline been doing some painting as you can see this is one of our resident squirrels we put sun's flower seeds out for them and you see they've got the routine down pretty well now we've got this equipment stage here to take up to the mine it's our latest purchases you can see we've got two ore cars here and a mucker this is definitely going to ramp up our productivity this would be brutal to unload this up there but it'll definitely be interesting to see how much more we can get done with all this i'm looking forward to using this mucker rather than doing all that by hand and over here we've got a bunch of ventilation pipe i just arrived staged and we're gonna start taking this up in sections and get this in so air can be pushed into the mine or sucked out as needed there's a lot more to come but this is what we're starting with well we've got the ore cars and the mucker up to the mine now but we're gonna have to reconfigure some things because those are side dumping ore cars but the ore car we have now is a front dumping one so we were going to reconfigure this anyway but i think the longer term plan we're gonna bring the rail out here around through there and sort of loop it around we're gonna put a waste rock pile there i think assuming the forest service uh allows that because we already have the existing waste rock pile here which i think i've shown before but for some reason the forest service doesn't want to change the geographic footprint of this even though this is all wastewater power here it wants to make a new one over there so i don't know you hear that that's that pump ripping away and you can barely hear it that is awesome i'm using the fire engine pumps that are really loud got water there's two separate lines running out here this is for fire protection we've got a hose running out for the workings here and we also have stuff up the hill where the hose is running right now in this area fires are a constant threat so we figured it'd be a good idea of a system and it does something a little water pouring out of the mine as well so seems like a win-win all around this is a uh i'm not sure i pronounce it it's flight f l y oh man fly gyt it's um owned by xylem this is the control panel for that pump you just flip this over to hand to turn it on and of course this is powered by our generator over there and the power lines run along here where the pump and the pump is just just back there see we've been doing some work down here this is uh fire resistant paint i haven't put the test but it's supposed to be fire resistant even though we just have the wood out here for a couple days before it goes underground and gets used that couple days sitting out here look how much it warps and bends and splits too it's how badly that one's split all the snow is completely gone from across the way it's hot now so yeah we're gonna have to get something set up to shade this shade these timbers because it's just ridiculous how uh how much this is warping and splitting mining is not just underground work it's surface work as well as i've tried to convey through these videos what we're doing today is clearing brush for fire prevention the forests here are wildly overgrown because there have not been forest fires coming through on a regular basis as there used to be before they started suppressing all the fires and so if you look at this massive accumulation of brush around us here this is not natural at all if you read the early accounts of pioneers that came out there were a few widely spaced trees and grass and wildflowers in between with a few scattered bushes here and there you did not have this impenetrable jungle of growth that you see now so we'll clean this out for fire prevention that powder magazines go up here and we need to have it very safe around them i just hosed down this area with that pump i showed earlier you see we ran a line up the hill here i host things down just to get a little extra level of fire protection because i'm using the chainsaw and i want to hit a rock or something and have a spark go off and start a fire because that would not be a good look so just hose it down i'm gonna get busy with the chainsaw here and keep pushing this this back a bit and do that probably for the rest of this week unfortunately because it's blazing hot right now so i just cut a bunch of that brush down so now i'm chipping it up this is incredibly satisfying [Music] so so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so that's one way to live up a tree [Music] so [Music] here's a view of what was cleared out [Music] this is the completed job all smoothed out and nice looking per the regulations we've got to have the space cleared out let's look at portal number two you

Channel: TVR Exploring

Views: 24,796

Rating: 4.9668965 out of 5

Keywords: bringing an abandoned gold mine back to life, exploring abandoned mines, abandoned mine, opening gold mine, rehabbing gold mine, rehabbing mine, ghost town, minecraft, underground gold mining, timber sets, gold mine construction, adit, stope, winze, mining techniques, ore car, msha, underground mine maintenance, mine maintenance, track repair

Id: in17WXlIM6k

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021