Based on the success of our trials with steel crossheads, we’re now taking the leap and finally trialling steel beams.

It’ll all be far more clear once we can show the pictures of us installing them, however in essence, we’ll be trying to keep the look of our timber bridges by only replacing the inner beams in steel and leaving the outers as timber.

This method allows us to install bracing, and as we need to replace 2 rather than just 1, we can cascade the (generally) good excess timber beam to a different location.

Our new band saw has proved invaluable in this task, cutting the various components, giving marvellous angle cuts.

And the portable bandsaw was great for the rough trimming of bits to make things much more manageable.

The magnetic drill with broach made drilling holes a breeze and allowed us to get from a pile of steel to a pair of beams ready to be installed in only 2 days!

The beams were delivered cut to length, saving us a lot of work.

The basic drawing follows the same style in use all over the VR system, modified only to suit current standard material sizes and available materials.

Most of today’s work was preparing the bracing, which we never got a completed pic of, however it’ll look pretty tidy once it’s all done. It’s a big mechano set, having now been disassembled for transport and insertion.

The plan is to get things out to the site on Friday and Monday and really get stuck in on Tuesday and Wednesday, the site being Muckleford Creek Bridge. We’ll still be meeting each day at Maldon 8am as we’ll need lots of tools etc.. 

In other news, Monday saw us replace the last fishplates between Donkey Farm Trk and the Bridge, meaning we’ve now replaced all the 6 hole plates between Maldon and Muckleford.

We’ve even stacked up our excess 6 hole fishplates into some long-term storage stacks. It’s amazing how little space they take up when stacked we’ll. The rail racks, in this case, weren’t intended for this purpose but will do the job well.

It’s been another busy week, with another big week to come next week!

Another pallet of fishplates today, getting us quite close to the bridge now – less than a pallet to go!

Tuesday’s crew also did another pallets worth, so we’re getting very fluent now.

We then moved our focus to Muckleford Creek Bridge, where this victim is this failed timber beam – failed due to end splitting (which is hard to see in the pic). All being well, late next week will see some more action here.

We also knocked over all of the clipping up! We’ve gone extremely well, and now that we’ll quite possibly never install fastclip sleepers again, we’re very quick at it!

Monday’s crew will do another pallet of plates, starting Maldon 8am or near the creek bridge from 8.30am.

A very successful day today, with another 24 pair of fishplates changed heading down towards the Bridge.

Today was the first cool morning for a while, and we did have one joint that needed a little adjustment from the nearby rails to go back together. We find this work is better in the warmer weather, as if it’s too cold, you can find yourself in a spot of trouble trying to get all the rails to bolt up – it really does expand and contract with the weather.

We’d be just under half of the way to the bridge by now.  That kept us entertained until morning tea.

The afternoon, albeit without photo evidence (sorry we forgot), saw us clipping up the fastclip sleepers between Chapmans Lane and the Bridge, at the end of last year we were awaiting an order of biscuits to complete this task, which are now all on hand and today saw about a third of the sleepers clipped up.

Tomorrow’s activities will be more of the above, another pallet of fishplates, then onto more sleeper clipping – which we may very well come close to knocking over tomorrow.

Due to the hot weather, we’ve cancelled tomorrow’s workday.

Things look like they’ll be back to normal next week.