Well today has taken us to pretty well job done at Bendigo Road Crossing.
The recent rain, although small compared with other parts of the country, has certainly soaked the ground.
Today’s tasks involved installing the two remaining junction rails and replacing any failed sleepers. Here we’re removing the spikes.
The new rails, of course didn’t match up with existing joints, so we chose to cut the existing rail rather than the nice long ones.
Last time we used the little digger for this job, which worked, but the big one made extremely light work of it.
The old rail was out in no time.
A good scrape away of the rock and with the pandrol adaptor’s installed, the new rail was about to go in.
Once the new rail was in place, we knew exactly where to cut and drill the existing rail.
The pandrol adaptor’s have the added advantage that once installed, the gauge is correct and held, so the digger can travel along very safely without worrying about any fastening up while trying to feed the new rail in.
By lunch we’d managed to get both rails in, with no real hassles or headaches.
We spent some time correcting the line of the track on the immediate down side of the crossing, which makes it look significantly better.
After lunch 11 failed timber sleepers were replaced with concrete, which we’re now quite practised in doing, so it also went like clock work.
The remainder of the day was spent jacking and packing the approaches to give a very smart looking length of track. We could still tweak the line a little, but unless we start running at 80km/h it’s a bit academic.
Tomorrow we’ll be correcting some track faults around Maldon Yard, meeting there from 8am.
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