Today was largely dedicated to removing some serious settlement of track around Maldon Yard. 1, 2 and the turntable road all received a lot of attention, with almost every joint lifted and a significant amount of plain track brought back up to correct height also.
Maldon yard is almost exclusively made up of fouled ballast these days, so it holds water and inevitably settles every winter, hopefully our very thorough effort this time will buy us a few years, when we can look at seriously fixing the situation.
Anyone familiar with the loco road at Maldon would know it’s always been uneven and quite rough, well it’s still both of those things, but now only slightly so. Some sections were lifted up to two inches (50mm), which has made a significant difference.
We found ourselves with a bit of spare time at the end of the day, so set about installing concrete sleepers under the outer insulated joint location for the upcoming Bendigo Road Flashing Lights.
As prefabricated 7ish metre modern glued insulated joints will be cut in and welded in place here, it’ll save a lot of effort if all that needs to occur is the current rail be unclipped and the new clipped back up, better than wasting time drilling more holes into these now fairly old timber sleepers.
We’ve only installed 7 so far, another couple to go and a few steel sleepers need to come out, so that’ll be Tuesday’s job, we also need to juggle some rail here to enable the welding in of the insulated joints, so hopefully that’ll get done Tuesday too.
Meeting Tuesday 8am at Maldon or on the up side of Bendigo Rd from 8.15am.
VGR Civil Blog 