The Maintenance of Macadamised Roads

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1879 Excerpt: ...the road, but stones properly laid in moist weather generally bind sufficiently well on ordinary roads without any picking up, as the weak places, or hollows, where patches should be laid, have softness enough to render the working in easy. At the most, a slight loosening of the surface round the margin of the patch is required to give the stones a hold, and hasten the setting. On roads of considerable thickness, where the surface is hard and the materials tough, picking up is sometime? useful. There is no danger of breaking up the whole road, and a quicker consolidation may be worth obtaining at the cost of the extra labour, and even of some of the old materials. Loosening to about inch in depth, and rather more round the edges, is sufficient for small-sized metalling. The tendency of workmen is to pick up too deeply, and it is unavoidable when fullsized stones are disturbed in their bed. Picking or stocking up the surface before laying fresh materials generally costs from d. to Id. per square yard. The use of a binding material in road maintenance, when materials are applied in thin coats and small patches, is seldom necessary or desirable. The road has already in it more than enough small stone and detritus to fill up all interstices, and in the damp weather in which stones should be laid there is generally little difficulty in getting a layer one stone thick to work in without adding any binding. On a road from which the mud is constantly removed, the places where fresh materials have been laid often appear after the stones have worked in as muddy places. So long as the materials remained unconsolidated, the mud forced out as the stones worked in could not be scraped off. It would evidently be a mistake to add unnecessarily to this excess of detritus in...