Another busy one today, with 183 concrete sleepers dropped off at Rowe Street ready for some major sleeper renewals alongside V/Line in the coming weeks during a big mainline shutdown.

We have also made a big leap forward in the construction of 4 siding outside the carriage shed.

We needed to borrow a couple of rails so we still need to bring a few in to finish it off, however we’ve broken the back of it, with everything clipped up and ready for ballasting.

And we’ve even run our first works train over the new 3 siding track to move various things into the right place for ballasting next week.

We’re starting to make great headway, in the yard here, but there will still be plenty more to come.

Next workday will be Tuesday back in Castlemaine from 8am.

Today was again very successful, with it being a day of clipping up and preparing for ballasting.

A frosty rather freezing start did turn into a rather stunning day thankfully.

We began by tweaking the positioning of the concrete sleepers ready for clipping up.

A very small tweak to the curve made it look quite stylish (a bit strange still with it’s steep grade but much better)

We’ve even replaced any failed timber in 3 siding, allowing us to undertake the required tamping works needed to lessen the grade into the shed.

As we ran into the same fishplate problem that we always do when using concrete sleepers, we decided it was wasteful to use all of our good bar plates in the yard, so we’ve modified some of the old 80lb plates from 6 holes into 4 holes, by cutting off the end. Perfectly adequate for our needs here.

We even finished installing any missing bolts in 4 siding, as we expect it’s traffic will increase with the move to Castlemaine.

We also knocked together 5 siding inside the shed, in what seemed like no time at all! We’re getting the hang of it now… Just in time to finish the job.

We’ll begin installing 4 siding outside the shed tomorrow, and will hopefully begin a ballast drop on 3 siding, ready to begin tamping. Meeting Castlemaine from 8am.

We’re starting to make great progress at Castlemaine, it’s all beginning to take shape.

3 siding is now once again connected up to the network and 5 siding has it’s sleepers and rails roughly positioned ready for clipping up tomorrow.

The height difference between the shed and the existing ground is very obvious! A lot of lifting, out a long distance toward the platform, will be required to achieve a better gradient.

We’ll be back into it tomorrow, meeting at Castlemaine from 8am.

Well today saw enormous progress made on the carriage shed trackwork.

We began by completing all the clipping up on 3 siding, a job which although fairly quick was quite an effort in the freezing cold of this morning.

Only one timber sleeper was required to complete these works and this was drilled and spiked while we were there.

The old end wall supports still had a fair amount of bolt sticking out of the concrete so they were trimmed to remove the tripping hazard. While we were there we undertook a lot of tidying and cleaning up, to make the shed more navigatable.

Again we seemed to achieve mountains of work after lunch, with all of 4 siding dragged in and laid out with all the lugs installed.

The rails were then lifted on as gently as possible so as not to move the well placed sleepers.

By day’s end we’d managed to completely align and seat the rail on all of the 91 steel sleepers dropped out and even clipped up the whole east leg! Leaving only a small amount of work for Tuesday.

A pretty good effort for really only a day and a half of work!

Next week we’ll be back on site Tuesday to complete the rest of this track and begin work on getting 3 road re-connected to the existing track. Meeting Castlemaine from 8am.