Tidying Up

We had a big day of finishing off and tidying up today.

Lots of jacking and tamping, after the addition of a little bit of rock in a few places.

We can comfortably say that within a few mm, this section of track is now level, something it hasn’t been for an extremely long time, as long as any of us can remember.

The hero’s of this work are the hydraulic jacks, we wouldn’t even consider this without them.

It’s a little hard to see in the pics, but hopefully the relative uniformity between the rails compared with photos of earlier in the week is noticeable.

We’re certainly very happy with the results. Given what we’ve got to work with for ballast and lifting equipment, we’re never going to get a mainline quality result at this stage of the game, but we’re miles ahead of where it was when it was still timber sleepers.

Something to be quite proud of.

We had a very pleasant surprise today, with beef and gravy rolls put on by the McCorkelle’s, it was extremely well recipient and a welcome addition in today’s cold. We’ll certainly see if we can twist their arms to repeat this for the other gangs sometime soon, to help commemorate and celebrate the enormous resleepering effort this year – we’ve hit 3515 sleeper now! (All since March).

The day wasn’t over there however, in preparation for the last major works before handing back the week-long occupations, we needed to gather a few lengths of 60lb rail, from Pipeline Crossing, which was successful achieved.

We’ll be beginning some fairly major Turnout Rejuvenation work in Maldon next week, which will likely require better rail than what’s currently buried. We’ll be knocking out access to the water column, turntable and headshunt for a bit so it’s very opportune to do it while there’s no weekday trains.

We’ll certainly be working Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, however Wednesday may become a machinery maintenance day, check back for details next week, all starting 8am Maldon Yard.