It was nice to finally get back out onto the track today, in what actually ended up being a warmish day in the sun.

We spent the day drilling holes, dropping out spikes, starting the spikes and driving them.

We’ve covered close to one km of spike driving today and probably around another 500m of drilling and standing.

Tomorrow’s crew will be continuing with this task, starting about 2kms this side of Sawmill Rd Crossing (enter via Sawmill Rd). The weather is looking a little unpredictable, however there isn’t any significant rain forecast to fall until the afternoon, so we should still achieve a bit. We’ll be meeting on site from around 8.15am.

We spent today propping up a pile at Muckleford Creek Bridge, the pile in question has needed lifting for some time, however the track above was level and the pile solid.

With all the recent rain the ground is now saturated and the pile was starting to settle under load, indicating the Sill is failing and hence not being adequately supported.

So we’ve looked up the plans and installed a temporary ground levek Sill to help prevent it getting any worse, until the ground dries out enough to repair it (and given that this pile is due for renewal in February anyhow, this fix will be more than adequate until then).

We also removed all the debris from around the bridge, washed down in the rains.

We then moved onto Winters Flat, to again remove debris. We’ve cleared what we can without swimming and we’re investigating ways of getting to the rest, however now that we’ve cleared what we have it’s unlikely to cause much issue in the rain predicted this weekend.

Thursday is looking wet, but we’ve been fooled before! So we’ll still planning on working, drilling and standing dog spikes. Meeting at Maldon at 7.45am, then out near Sawmill Rd Bridge from 8.15am.

Tomorrow we’ll be meeting at Maldon from 8am, where we need to prepare several vehicles for the rest of the week.

We’ll then be heading out to Muckleford Creek, however that may not be until 9am or later.

As always following a good storm, we had a tree decide to join us on the ground, but thankfully that was quite easily fixed.

A full patrol including testing of all flashing lights etc… was undertaken this morning. We’ve escaped very lightly, with this being the worst issue, a few trees piled up against Winters Flat Bridge. Until the water subsides, we won’t be able to remove the trees, however no damage has been caused.

The whole district lost power when water flooded into the Castlemaine substation, however thankfully flood water receded much quick that expected and we haven’t run into any trouble with the power being out for an extended time.

The flow at Muckleford Creek reached places it hadn’t for a very long time, and would appear to have saturated some of the usually very dry areas. The saturation has led to one pile settling a little further, around 6mm (when under load, we made use of the T class doing another of its test runs) more than previously, so we’ve placed a temporary speed restriction over the bridge until it dries out enough next week to get in and place some additional packing in to level the bridge back up. It’s really just routine maintenance and a result of some very very wet ground!

We’re extremely fortunate that these were our only issues out on the track, all very easily fixed.

Next week’s workdays will be a little all over the place, as there’s a few things that we need to tend to, so please check back Monday night for details of Tuesday.