The final rail train

The final rail train for 2020 was combined with a nice simple Christmas Breakup.

But as always on the civil gang, you never get a free lunch….

The day began with the everyone standing around the entire fleet of trucks allocating jobs.

The jobs were either track inspecting or heading out along the Guildford track picking up the odds and sods.

Bruce chose a third option, whipper snipping around all the level crossing, he’s now done this three times this season at some crossings! They do look significantly better for it too.

The track walkers started in Maldon, checking everything as they went.

The rolling track gauger was put to very good use, with readings such as shown here (1mm) now very much more the norm, a very pleasing thing given all the re-sleepering we’ve done this year!

Morning tea in some of the little available shade, unfortunately from now through till March we do need to plan works around having some shade.

A significant dip just out of Muckleford that was detected in Yesterday’s inspection was jacked and packed with a kango hammer, not a fun job but thankfully not too large a task given it was localised to just the joint.

The other half of the gang was busily out collecting bolts, drums of anchors, steel sleepers and anything else we still had trackside out to Guildford.

And come lunch time it was back to Maldon to have a feed, jump on the train and check out all the work we’d done this year.

All the short lengths of rail were loaded up, while the gang offered quality supervision.

Or just ate food.

We got both diggers in on the action, side loading different wagons (the rails had sort of been placed to allow this to work and it saved a lot of time). – unfortunately the video hasn’t transfered through in great quality but it shows the action.

Then it was off to Castlemaine to run around and allow a few of the gang to meet a train home.

A nice little train, but with a purpose.

The train ready to head home.

And home we went inspecting all the rail dropped out along the way.

The rail wagons were quickly dropped off in Muckleford Yard to allow for unloading and stacking over the coming days.

It’s not quite the end of the year’s work, but it is more or less the end of gangs for 2020.

We’re planning to collect and transport all the fastenings on Monday and Tuesday, pack up the gear and return everything home on Wednesday and Thursday.

However there will be a small gang on next Thursday for anyone who is really organised with their Christmas Shopping and looking for a day out in the bush, details tbc.

We’d like to say a massive thank you to everyone for their help this year. Despite Covid, it’s been an enormous year, easily the busiest we’ve had in a couple of decades with several major projects on the go, thanks to everyone for helping us kick so many goals! It’s worth a quick look back over the last year’s blog posts to see just how much we have achieved.