Shelton Drainage Design Speciality Machine for Lincolnshire Caravan Park

Lincolnshire drainage company Shelton Drainage have re-designed one of their specialist trenchers to specifically drain one of the counties coastal caravan parks.

Tomlinsons Leisure Park is based in Chapel St Leonards near Skegness and had been suffering from localised winter flooding on the site. Adrian Willock contacted Shelton in the Autumn of 2017 to see if they could help with the problem. Shelton Director Richard Clark said: "Our trenchers are designed for use either in agriculture or on sportsturf facilities, such as golf courses and football pitches, but the technology is perfectly suited for a leisure or caravan park as they are designed to create minimal disturbance to the turf and allow it to be back in use in as shorter time as possible, in some cases this can be as little as 24 hours. The trenchers we manufacture are light yet robust and are designed to run behind small compact tractors.  The machine works by cutting a narrow trench through the turf and normally uses a side conveyor to elevate the soil into a trailer running alongside. On a golf course or football pitch space isn't an issue, however for this job we needed to make a change to the position of the conveyor as there simply wouldn't be enough space to use it between the caravans. We relish a challenge so we started to re-design the trencher so that it would carry out all the same functions but take up half the space.

After our site meeting at Tomlinsons, we spent about 3 weeks designing and modifying the machine so that the excavated soil could be discharged at the front of the tractor enabling the work to be completed in a convoy rather than a side by side formation. This was achieved by fitting an additional conveyor that runs underneath the tractor this in turn feeds into the re-positioned side conveyor which is now mounted on the front of the tractor. The spoil is collected from the conveyor by a tractor and trailer running in front of the machine. We installed the drainage system between the rows of caravans in 20 days, backfilling the pipe work with Sportag; a spherical aggregate which speeds up the flow of water into the pipe and retains moisture during the drier summer months minimizing the chance of grass dying over the trench lines which can happen when using traditional aggregates. We were really pleased with how the machine performed."

Adrian Willock said: "It's always good to work with a local company, and Shelton are at the cutting edge of drainage technology quite literally. Using a local company has provided the benefit of additional flexibility for the project, important when trying to get ground work completed when the site is closed. Having Shelton Drainage deliver a bespoke method of drainage has allowed the project to be concluded in a short time with the minimum of disturbance to site."