This week has seen lots of rail towed, some more lineside mowing around Muckleford and a bit of ballast brooming.
Today was successful in getting another lot of rails over Stephen Street as well as almost dragging all the remain loose rails up to there also.
Monday saw the Muckleford area lineside grass trimmed, making a significant improvement. The rail transport wagons have also had their great stacks of rails and sleepers removed ready for moving rail in the coming weeks.
As part of the re-railing process, we’ve decided to have the whole section to be re-railed broomed. (Muckleford to Winters Flat Bridge basically).
We hired in a specialised excavator attachment that does exactly that, sweeps the ballast from around the fastenings for much easier access when it’s time to re-rail.
It also gives us a smooth strip next to the existing rail to drop out the new rail, allowing it to sit as low as possible. It would be nice to have one of these of our own so we can make the onerous job of ballast clearing that much easier, hopefully one day. This job would take blokes with blowers and forks literally weeks, whereas the attachment took only a few hours!
The attachment works extremely well, leaving a very clear area around the fastenings and a nice windrow down the centre, useful for down the track when we need a bit of rock to lift out small dips etc…
Tomorrow will see us crossing Moscript St. again, meeting there from 8.15am.
VGR Civil Blog 