Finishing touches

Today was spent finishing off yesterday’s efforts at curve 9 by running out ballast and tamping.

We started by collecting the re-usable sleepers that were removed from the track yesterday and bundling them into packs of 16 for use elsewhere.

Just before morning tea our ballast train, well ballast wagon and a couple of well wagons, arrived and the rock was dropped and spread as required very swiftly.

We took the opportunity to load up the bundled sleepers and send them off to Muckleford.

A view of spread ballast prior to tamping. The new rock is the bluier material in the distance, as that was the area in most need.

A view post tamping after the gang has followed along boxing up the holes and cleaning the rock away from the sleepers and rails.

The new works look very impressive! A real credit to everyone involved.

Besides the continual need for monitoring and likely need for tamping as things settle, we expect to receive many years from this section before more serious works are needed.

Hopefully the next works will be re-railing, which should be an absolute breeze with these sleepers.

A close up, as promised, of our manufactured biscuits. As they are designed to do an almost identical job in steel sleepers, they are a perfect match for the 60lb rail on the concrete sleepers. It’s just a massive bonus we can cut one lug and get two biscuits!

The full assembly. We would strongly expect, like in the normal situation with heavier rail, this clipping will also have an anchoring effect, we’ll be monitoring this but it’ll take a few years to really know.

In the afternoon, with the main job done and dusted, we headed back to Maldon. Attending to some issues in 4 road. This pic shows a large dip which has been present since the last works here (we ran out of ballast at the time) being removed.

We also decided it was long overdue to replace some of the sleepers, particularly those near the derail block.

So 11 sleepers were replaced, meaning this once lightly used siding is now fit for the regular traffic it has been receiving. Here the ballast shoulder has been removed to allow for removal of the old and insertion of the new.

By this afternoon the gang had dwindled to only 3 so after fastening up the sleepers we called it a day. Tamping and scrapping back the ballast can wait until Monday.

Tuesday is set to be another workday, with more materials for the next project to be run out. Any extra hands would be greatly appreciated as it’ll be a bit fiddly fitting our works train around the seniors week special.