Mountain biking infrastructure is a rare commodity in Singapore. Couple that with a wet tropical 365 days of unpredictable rainy climate, realising a soil based pump track is always a hit or miss.
We chance upon the opportunity to push a pump track in a central Singapore Community Centre, right into the (typically) traditionally managed social club where sports normally means team game, community bonding activities. So is really a big deal to push mountain biking as one of the youth sports to such land managers.
Working with the ad-hoc mountain biking club hosted at Macpherson Community Club, we managed to work a plan to put forward a soil based pump track into Macpherson Community Club garden.
The track is constructed with a composition of sandy and lime based dirt from the new Downtown Line subway excavation nearby, a durable composition that wish to experiment for wet tropical tracks, where traditional clay based tracks does not work well in Singapore.
With the assistance of a skid-steer loader, and great bunch of volunteers from the community (B26er, ITE Central Mountain Bike Club, the individuals) we decked up a working pump track in 5days, and with some further few days of work from the volunteer we have a natural grassy sides to help with soil control.
The track will be a work in progress, where we expect the hosting club, B26er, to continue with the maintainance efforts and keep it shape up for the various style of biking one could do.
