It was a very productive day, with much better weather than yesterday.

The gang worked very hard, removing around 1km on anchors, an enormous job, with most of them first needing finding in the ballast, before receiving a good hit from a sledge to set them free, it’s certainly not the best job on the track.

While the hitting was going on, sleepers were being extracted from the roadbed near Hutchinson’s Ln, the piles of old timber can just be seen in the pic above, still a lot to go but we’re getting there.

Next week we’re planning on preparing the next ski jump at Stephen St. and start towing up to the next crossing. Meeting at Stephen Street from 8.30am.

It was a very productive day, with much better weather than yesterday.

The gang worked very hard, removing around 1km on anchors, an enormous job, with most of them first needing finding in the ballast, before receiving a good hit from a sledge to set them free, it’s certainly not the best job on the track.

While the hitting was going on, sleepers were being extracted from the roadbed near Hutchinson’s Ln, the piles of old timber can just be seen in the pic above, still a lot to go but we’re getting there.

Next week we’re planning on preparing the next ski jump at Stephen St. and start towing up to the next crossing. Meeting at Stephen Street from 8.30am.

In what can only be described as a miserable rainy day, we seem to have experienced every possible setback known to a track gang, but hopefully that’s behind us now and tomorrow will be a better day.

Despite contending with a flat tyre, hydraulic failure and fuel system trouble, we did manage to remove a good number of sleepers from the road bed and transport them to easy collection points. Unfortunately the job is made a bit harder by the incredibly poor timber condition, but that’s the nature of the beast.

Tomorrow’s weather is predicted to be far kinder, and all going well we’ll break into a couple of groups. One continuing with the sleeper removal and the other removing anchors for the next section of sledding.

Meeting at Donkey Gully Rd from 8.15am.

Another day of towing rails over Fryers Rd has seen us completely fill the 5 foot between Fryers Rd and Stephen Street, approx 80 rails, which doesn’t sound a lot, but it certainly looks a mountain of rail.

We’re quite proud of our efforts.

Given the somewhat dramatic weather forecast for tomorrow, chance of heavy rain from lunchtime and the need to catch up on a bit of machine servicing, there won’t be a workday tomorrow.

Thursday is also predicted to be wet, we do have a lot we can do in the rain but it’s more machine work than gang work, so we’ll update you tomorrow on the status of Thursday once we see how the weather situation pans out.