After what continued to be an intense week for V/Line and their contractors, the section of track over the Midland Hwy Arch bridge was reinstated and finished off.

Wednesday saw the track rebuilt, and due to a few design changes our track was lifted to give a greater ballast depth over the arch of the bridge – this didn’t really impact us, it was more about the longevity of the water proofing on the bridge structure below.

However, the raise was significant enough to need the approaches lifting, meaning a tamper and regulator paid us a visit.

Several passes were made from Rowe Street through to the North end of Forest Creek Bridge. With some locations coming up just over 200mm, meaning a lot of ballast was added.

In anticipation of this, V/line also replaced 40 of our remaining timber sleepers with concrete. These were mainly in the section between the bridges and a few back towards Rowe St.

A few videos follow of the tamper and reg in action.

As always, it’s very impressive to watch the ability of the machines and the operators, and the end result was very impressive.

The end result of all this tamping was pretty impressive.

The following day the once the welding, bolting, and clean up were fully completed, it looked a million dollars.

At the end of this project, with the combined effort from us and V/Line 152 sleepers in this section were replaced, leaving only 28 timber sleepers between Rowe St and the Arch Bridge – all outside of the ‘fouling’ area so we can change these at our leisure. There are about 8 timber sleepers remaining over Forest Creek Bridge. However, they’ll last at least another 10 years.

It’s a pretty landmark moment for the VGR, beside tamping, foliage, bolt tightening, etc… the maintenance here has dropped right off, and the track is now extremely solid – an insight into what we’re heading towards all the way through to Maldon.

In completely unrelated matters, the concrete floor in the loco shed at Castlemaine is now ready to use (in fact, we did some digger maintenance there earlier in the week, and it was Marvellous). Fill has been placed around the edges to make it safe to walk and use. 

As time, resources, money etc… permit, we’ll continue with this work, hopefully by the end of this year the second pit will be ready to go and at least some of the annex will be concreted.

Next week’s workday on Monday is cancelled (public holiday) and Tuesday will be about getting the last of the equipment through to Maldon – as such, no real workday will occur. Check back closer for Wednesday/Thursday info.

On account of the forecast rain, we’ll call off civil work for Monday. It’s looking pretty good for the rest of the week so Tuesday should be business as usual, meeting Castlemaine Yard from 8am.

After the success of the past week, today saw us knock over all the tidy up tasks quite efficiently.

We began by bundling up the timber sleepers. Out of the 112 timbers replaced, 92 came out in one piece, and 80 of those were reasonable. Only about 5 of them could be classed as good, however.

We then used the opportunity to remove a few problem and fallen trees beside the track around Castlemaine Yard. There’s a lot more to go. However, those trees are very hard to access.

The recently finished section was then given a blow for the full length to show the fastenings, making future inspections easier, it also looks very smart being so consistent. Any missing clips or loose bolts were tended to also.

The V/Line works are continuing at a great rate. We haven’t imposed upon their worksite to get any close-up shots.

Given the success of our endeavours and the success of Barry Dunn and his crew in repainting the previously removed water column, we thought we’d have a crack at getting it back up.

It all went very smoothly and certainly does improve the overall appearance of the area.

The fresh white paint of the sign and coloumn certainly stands out now. Hopefully, as time goes on, we’ll be able to start repainting all the fixtures around the yard.

All that’s really left now to complete the job, given that we also fail mowed out in the work area today, is to do a weedspray pass tomorrow and we’ll hand our permit to foul back to V/Line so they can progress with their works. It’s been a very successful weeks’ work!

Next week is a little up in the air, it may well be wet, check back on Sunday night for an update.

We’ve had an extremely successful few days, with 112 concrete sleepers being installed, clipped up, tamped and ballast boxed up. The weather was much kinder today, compared to yesterday’s stormy humid conditions that were awful, but we still managed to get a good amount done.

It’s not as pretty as the production tamped and regulated Vline track, however, it’s looking pretty snazzy. A bit more work with the blower and it’ll look quite tidy.

With the exception of the turnout to V/Line track, we’ve now got 100% concrete sleepers between the Yard and Forest Creek Bridge.

V/line are still working on waterproofing works at Johnstone Street Bridge and will be for a few days, some of that work will involve replacing a few of the timber sleepers that still existed in our track in that area, meaning we’ll likely be left with only a dozen or so timber sleepers in this section to remove in a future shutdown.

Although the sleepers are in, our work isn’t yet complete, we still need to bundle up the timber, now, remove and spray the lineside growth and generally tidy up the area.

Tomorrow’s crew will meet at Castlemaine Depot at 8am.