Castlemaine

Well we made more of a mess today, but it was also very productive.

We inserted 110 concrete sleepers into the turntable track.

As we used full profile concrete sleepers, we needed to lift the track to insert the sleepers. Initially we ran through and pulled all the spikes and changed the fishplates. Following that every 3rd sleeper was swapped for a concrete one while the track was jacked ahead of the work enough to slide the thick sleeper under.

We got very efficient at this, thankfully as the lugs on the concrete sleeper prevent the track going too far over gauge we could run the digger along without needing to clip anything up.

Before everything was clipped up, we lined the straight, looking pretty snazzy now.

A few vertical issues to sort out now but that should be fairly easy.

We still need to bring an additional 20 sleepers to site (because it turns out Will can’t count!) but they won’t hold up the urgent works starting very shortly.

We’ve still got a lot to do here and any extra hands would be very very welcome tomorrow, meeting at Castlemaine from around 8.15am.