A momentous day

Today marks the final rerailing works planned for 2022!

Yesterday gang installed the 94lb rail on the Down leg over Sawmill Road Bridge, while today’s gang completed the Up leg.

You’ll notice we’ve used long enough rails to span the bridge without joints, we set aside some 55m rails early on in the process for this purpose. At the UP end, or behind the camera, where the 55m rails end we’ve dropped back to 60lb before the level crossing, as we’ll need to rebuild the crossing as part of that work.

It’s now an incredibly different trip between Sawmill Road and Muckleford, well worth doing a trip on the train to notice what a difference it makes.

Although Sawmill Road crossing will be rerailed in 94lb, when it’s rebuilt, as soon as we’re on the up side of the crossing we’ll be dropping back to 80lb for the remainder through to Brown Street Ped. Crossing. So today really marked the end of the 94lb rerailing!

So… for some no doubt thrilling figures…

This week saw 427m of rail installed, taking us to 2552m of rail installed for August.

July was a slightly more impressive month, with 2949m of rail installed with the only other month being March which saw 550m of rail installed.

A total of 6,051m of 94lb rail has been installed into the track (or alternatively 3,025.5m of track was rerailed), which is an enormous achievement in such as short space of time! Everyone who’s been involved should be extremely proud.

Although we’ve now completed the rerailing, the job is far from over… we still need to return to Farmers Bridge and work through to Sawmill Rd inserting sleeper plates and spiking them up. We also need to replace all the failed timber sleepers with concrete and tidy all the jewellery and mess we’ve made along the way! Sounds easy if you say it fast, we expect this to take as long as the rerailing did, however we might find we get into a good rhythm and it goes quickly.

As the weather will be warming up around this time, it’ll be less than ideal to be doing rerailing works, so we’ll divert to other works until around Easter 2023 when we’ll finish the rerailing and remove the last of the 60lb in our mainline, we may do a little more this year around Winters Flat Bridge, depending on the weather.

Next Tuesday will be a change of pace, we’ll be meeting at Maldon 8am undertaking a range of odd jobs ahead of Thursday and Friday when we’ll be back out on the job installing sleeper plates.