Two tasks were tackled today, preparing more 80lb rail and replacing sleepers in 3 road at Muckleford.
The day began with the rail preparation, in the usual manner of laying them out for either drilling or cutting.
Some close up pics of the rail drill, a very cleaver piece of equipment, making the job of drilling holes rather easy.
Here Rolf, the master of the rail saw, shows us how its done.
We end up with heaps of these little off cuts, they make good anvils if you’re ever in need of one.
While there we also staked some more of the shorter rails in a pile, these are not desirable in the running line, but we’ll likely use them in yards as time goes on. Here the excavator is putting out sleepers as bearers for the rails to sit on.
Normally we’d stack the rails straight onto the well wagons, but as they’re both loaded with concrete sleepers ready for our next jobs, the rails were placed in a nice stack for loading next time.
Once the rails were under control we moved onto the sleepers in 3 road. It’s been a few years since a sleeper cycle was done through here but it should be right for a few years now.
The gang all mucked in as usual, using the gauger and various tools to spike up the sleepers.
A quick tamp saw them fit for traffic and while we had the tamper out some sunken track near the goods shed was corrected.
30 sleepers we installed in total, not a bad number considering a similar number of rails were prepared also.
A quick run over with the bucket to tidy up the dislodged ballast and fill the voids left the job looking more mainline than siding!
This effort is to ensure the siding is fit to house the Victorian Colonial Express during the upcoming Mucklefest weekend, head to vgr.com.au to check out the details.
As tomorrow is a public holiday the usual Friday gang will not be running.
We’ll be back into the swing next week however, with the plan to test install 100 concretes under some 60lb!
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