Curve 11

Today saw the last curve on the whole line receive either concrete sleepers or heavier rail. A big achievement.

We flew through clipping up the remaining 50 or so sleepers, being well completed by lunch.

After which we turned our attention to ballast scraping and tamping.

This whole curve has had issues with cant (superelevation / cross fall) for a long time. We’ve tried spot corrections, which helped but we still had sections of negative cant and generally little to none elsewhere (less than desirable).

So we set about putting a track jack at every single concrete sleeper in the curve and jacking until the cross fall was around 25mm – a big job on this long long curve.

We were also corrected any dips that we came across. By the end of the curve we had a sensational system going to race the jacks along the job, largely carried our by our prison assistance, we’d certainly be struggling without them on these sorts of jobs.

But the end result was a stunning curve, beautifully smooth (a few crippled rails let it down unfortunately) and we’re incredibly proud, the best and the quickest curve we’ve completed to date.

Next week we’ll be sending our digger off to Daylesford to assist with some works on their railway.

However our usual gangs will still be running, with 80lb rail preparation on the cards for Thursday.