Today’s slightly wet weather didn’t slow the gang too much, we did however decide not to begin in re-railing today.
The day was spent distributing jewellery (fishplates, bolts and dog spikes) and bolting up rails into strings of 4.
Each joint is well lubricated prior to installing the bolts by hand ready for mechanical tightening. This helps ensure we can cater for expansion and contraction of the rails during varying weather conditions, with the joints taking up the length differences.
We’ve even found that our wonderful little battery rattle gun is perfectly sufficient to tighten all these bolts, which is a massive saving on back breaking work lugging around the petrol guns.
By the days end we’re ready to go headlong into this re-railing job as time permits.
Now it did rain very heavily last night and such we felt it our responsibility to test the depth to which the moisture had soaked in…. The answer is far enough to bog a truck! Thankfully we have other trucks which can help extract immobile vehicles such as in this situation.
A job that we’d had on the books for a while was a couple of groups of bad sleepers in curves 17 & 18. Nothing too serious but they never improve on their own, so given we completed today’s aim ahead of schedule we thought we attend to them.
As it was only a few we removed all the spikes in the old fashion way, by hammer. Sleeper plates also.
We didn’t quite extend that manual labour to the sleeper removal however.
We even corrected a couple of small spacing issues while we were on site.
Although we’ve removed the few sleepers, we won’t be installing until the morning (when we actually being them out to site).
Meeting Maldon 8am or by curve 18 from 8.30am.
VGR Civil Blog 
How much of the total line has been upgraded to 80lb? Is the plan to do the whole line?
You team seems very productive and VGR should be proud of your continuing achievements.
Keep up the good work.
LikeLike
Hi Simon, we’re down to the last few hundred metres between Maldon and Muckleford still 60lb, from there to Castlemaine we’ve got all but 4 of the curves re-railed in 80lb on one side only, the other curves have / are being reinforced with concreteorced . So still plenty to go but we’re certainly well over half way to getting the whole line upgraded.
LikeLike
Hi Simon, we’re down to the last few hundred metres between Maldon and Muckleford still 60lb, from there to Castlemaine we’ve got all but 4 of the curves re-railed in 80lb on one side only, the other curves have / are being reinforced with concrete. So still plenty to go but we’re certainly well over half way to getting the whole line upgraded.
LikeLike