Castlemaine

The 3 siding extension, north of the carriage shed ended up being today’s task. We had planned on doing more pit timbering, however the sharpened saw wasn’t ready until lunch time and we certainly weren’t going to sit around doing nothing until then!

We chose to lift the last 3 lightly built track panels, as it was pretty obvious they weren’t really going to prove that useful given we’re very likely to use this road to store heavy loads of concrete sleepers and rails during the upcoming workshop and loco shed track works.

A rough trench was dug for the new track, down to old sleeper level and the best of the temporary panels were cascaded to the very north end, that will only be for light storage.

All the while, Rolf was busily setting out the exact line of the 2nd turntable track, that we made a very brief start on earlier in the week.

We’ve had two panels of 80lb steel sleepered track laying around for some time, so we bolted them onto the end of 80lb through the shed.

The little digger is right on it’s limit with a panel like this, but it managed, without having to call for backup from the big digger. The rails out the back of the shed weren’t quite square, so that was corrected before we slewed this panel into it’s final home.

Although these panels used the original bolt and plate type of fastening, we needed to install one extra steel sleeper, using the pandrol type fastening, which gave us a chance to use our two brand new pan pullers.  What a treat!

Using the last of our loose steel sleepers, we extended the 80lb another 3 rail lengths. A process which we’re now very fluent in.

Unfortunately around 2pm the rain set in! We’ve completed clipping up the 80lb on steel sleepers and we’ve even roughly junctioned that up to the 60lb timber sleepered panel, but the rain put pay to any further works.

An excellent day’s work however, we’ve managed to largely complete another job to a standard that should require little to no attention for many years.

Tomorrow we’ll be meeting at Castlemaine around 8.15am, where we’ll get back into the pit timbering.