After a massive day yesterday and again the morning, we successfully replace 54 life expired timber sleepers with concretes.

It was a mammoth job, as it turned out! The sleeper extraction and insertion took no time at all but clipping up the concretes took far longer than expected.

We had big issues with ‘under gauge’ track requiring pushing out, it was only generally 2 or 3 mm and well within any tolerance except that of the absolute 0 tolerance concrete sleepers!!

A bit of tamping and regulating the ballast saw the job completed around 10am this morning.

An enormous thank you to everyone who helped, we couldn’t have even thought about it without your help.

A big shout out to V/Line for all their assistance in protecting the worksite and for organising our permit to foul.

A couple of true action shots from Thursday’s re-railing.

Here we’ve got Rolf on the spike driver, while Clive and Bruce look on.

And really track work days are all about morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea with a bit of work in between! Here is a typical lunch ritual, with Will, Clive and Bruce all propped up in the comfy chairs enjoy a bit of shade.

(Pics Norm Mauger)

In much more kind weather, we completed the re-railing of the straight at Pipeline Xing.

Here we see Clive busily extracting dog spikes.

A view of the 60lb de-dogged and de-screwed looking in the Down Direction.

An overall shot looking down of the job done. You can see the ‘ramp’ that we make under the old 60lb so that it comes up to the same height as the 80lb.

Although we had a very successful attempt at inserting a concrete sleeper with our new grab, it could have been a bit gentler on the sleeper.

So today we’re trying out some pads for the teeth of the grabs.

To test it out we’re putting in a concrete sleeper right next to the big red shed.

Edit – 1730 6/12/17

The pads or boots for the grab worked very nicely, few little tweaks but overall excellent results.

And just to prove it did actually put a sleeper in: