We’re just got back into Tampines Bike Park just after Christmas. With 2 months of time for trail work (Feb 14th 2009 being our internal dateline for GO!), it seems that some interesting lines can be placed into Tampines for this coming race.
First we’ve to address a few issues before building new one. The state of the trail is bad after the new contractor for this place trying to keep things sane by doing whatever without knowing what is it to manage a bike park. The wooden wonder is rotting away with various key bridges broken, the pond loop is disconnected as the new earthy plateau is place over the old BikeAsia100 race trail. Descender is a series of ruts (is a fall line truck road in the first place) and Mimosa is eating up the whole trail.
With a bit of luck and planning, National Parks committed some resources from their contractors to grass cut whatever needed so to ‘resurface’ all those hidden trails that everyone race on a good 9mths ago. Dirtraction with RMC came together with a proposal to get all these fix up before moving forward to build new trails.
With resources tight as ever and the economics timing as bad as the imploding white dwarf, support for these trail restoration effort is minimal. We’ve (Dirtraction and RMC) decided to place in our own resources, time and money to complement and get things into place before we loose all these trails to mother earth again.
The bridges is repaired, new connecting lines from the pond loop to the top of the kidney hill is made and most of the grass cutting are done within this one month.
– the wooded wonder is totally ridable now.
– pond loop is now connected to the new lower kidney climb
– kidney loop is split and reused (600metres)
– totally new upper kidney descend and contour line ride is created (approx 800m)
Jason inspecting the ‘Jungle Bridge’
the lower kidney climb
Bush fire in tampines,beware NO naked fire for this dry season!
Bush fire in tampines,beware NO naked fire for this dry season!
With the addition of new these new trails in tampines, this coming Night Marathon race can be race on the ‘best of’ Tampines Bike Park.
Monster Mud Madness is probably gone and the good old finishing straight would no longer take the riders with the old Kids Singletrack taking over.
A point to note,
Upper Kidney and Lower Kidney still needed abit of surfacing work. the trail is freshly cut, ruts are big and random. we will make it a fun surface to ride on soon.