Building a bike track

We have an old very badly built Mtb track in our local park. It’s neither pump track nor Mtb trail.
I’ve been working away for over 2 years on permission, fundraising and recruiting help to redesign and rebuild it.
We started off measuring how long the old track was, and enjoyed riding it when it was actually dry! It’s rarely dry.

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We did a task day with the friends of the park and hacked back some undergrowth, and my son and his mate did 10 bike tracks in a day to fundraise over £600. Total raised from local donors, a small grant and fundraising was £6000.

Finally started on site properly in Feb this year.
More pruning and cutting back overgrowth, pulling up brambles with the digger and started hunting for

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Next we started moving some massive rocks which were tipped at some point years ago and had no obvious purpose. These were stacked and back filled to raise the start hill which was too low

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You can start to see some of the space cleared which will allow for a blue Mtb trail round the edge using the height around the site, a jump line/ pump track loop inside this, and a smaller loop for little kids and balance bikes.
All the machine work is being done free of charge by local hero and Mtb legend John Thorpe of farmer johns fame. This was critical to being able to do a major refurbishment, without John we’d be stuck with hand tools and limited scope to change much

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Wow! That is absolutely brilliant! well done to everyone involved (especially your son and his mate) for their hard work and fund raising efforts.

The site is a pain as the bike is far from the park road across a boggy field. Heavy loads of dirt have to be tipped on the car park, then loaded by tractor into the smaller tipper trailer and taken over to the site. This adds a few steps but taking 20ton + wagons across the park is impossible.

The fill material was free from local Jewsons for the first go. It’s a bit rough and brick filled but it’ll be great to lift the height of the trails out of the wet

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Next up is drainage, clearing some tree stumps, then start laying out the fill material to form the shapes of the trails.

This looks great. Where are you based? I am part of the volunteer trail building team at the Forest of Dean, it can be immensely rewarding work.

Subbed, what a great thing to do and no half measures by the look of it!

Have you got any other task days coming up? Or need volunteers for anything during the week? I've got a 2-3 days I can take with work to help with local projects and the like.

It’s in Brabyns park in marple near Stockport.
@atk yes we will eventually have volunteer days, but for now it’s machine work so only the pros allowed. I just watch and help sweep up at the moment whilst John works his magic.

Thanks. Will keep an eye out for those :)

You are lucky to have pros with machines. Forestry England will only allow us to use hand tools (the most exciting things they permit on top of hand tools are whacker plates and a power barrow). Contractors have to do the grown up machine work.

What we can do in a half day dig with a crew of ten volunteers can be done by one man and a machine.

Sounds like you have a good plan of what to do and will be getting great support and advice too from John.

Well done for taking this on - great project

Yeh it’s much more feasible having a pro builder doing the work rather than volunteers or regular council contractors. It took almost 2 years to sort permissions for this to happen, councils being naturally risk averse and bike trail builders/farmers being naturally not fans of excessive paperwork!

The dirt they shifted today would have taken days for a team of volunteers to move and we’d all be knackered now!

Final post for now.
It made me laugh that my son who was just riding his bike round the old track is now riding red trails, racing and winning at bmx and generally loves jumping!
We also today started work on planning the Bike @ Brabyns sign with a heap of donated bits

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Amazing work. You should be really proud.

Does anyone have a source for coloured trail markers? Surprisingly hard to find. We only need green and blue, and only a small handful of each.

Legend!

I may be able to help here..pm me.

Thanks I’ve messaged you

Can anyone confirm my ropey maths that 200m cubed of material is roughly 200 tons assuming a 1 ton bag is about 1 metre cubed? Does that logic work?

Looks fine by me

Thanks to @Merak for offering to help with some marker signs, absolute hero.

Probably more. Water weighs 1000 kg/ cubic metre, concrete up to 2200 kg /cube.
Depending on the size of the rocks and the filling I thinks 200 m3 will be closer to 300 ton.
(metric values)

Even better news thanks pal, means we have a bit more material to play with if needed.