Curve 13

Well the low leg of Curve 13 is now all heavy rail, in long lengths and all fastened down. Sorry about the photos, for some reason the software has changed again and decided to make them small for some reason!

In almost record time, by morning tea we had everything unfastened and most of the new rail more or less in place.

As this section was all timber, we made good use of our new tools, custom made by Ian. Sleeper plate shover under-ers. The certainly save hours of backbreaking bending over.

For the first time in years we even dragged out the hydraulic gauger, not often we need this these days as the gauge is generally very uniform across the Railway, but it is very handy doing this sort of work holding the gauge while drilling timber.

At the UP end, we’re into the straight and we’ve found a short welded Junction rail, to drop the rail size from 94lb to 80lb so we can use standard 80lb/60lb junction plates. As we progress the re-railing this length will get cascaded along. We’ve got a similar piece ready for the other leg.

After running through with the gauging run of 1 in 3, a quick tamping pass to make sure everything was hard up against the rail made the finally drilling and dogging run much quicker.

A well organised process these days, taking no time at all.

As we were running well ahead of schedule, we replaced 25 failed timber sleepers with concrete.

Some final tamping and removal of a dip just past the road crossing (unconnected with the job but nice to remove while on site) has left this length of track looking very nice.

Today saw us re-rail 241m of rail, almost all of which was on timber sleepers, 25 sleepers replaced and everything finished besides tidying up! A pretty amazing effort! Next week we’ll be tidying up and tackling the straight, which should happen very quickly as we’re back into 1 in 3 concrete sleeper territory.

We’ll have workdays on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday for anyone interested, meeting Maldon 8am on Monday or out at Muckleford from 8.30am.