Odd Jobs

It’s been a week of odd jobs and a bit of left field stuff that has kept us busy in various ways.

Today’s and Tuesday’s gangs took on thr rather unglorious, but still very essential, task of turnout cleaning and lubricating. Tuesday saw all of Castlemaine, including the bits below the signal box, lubricated and checked. While today’s crew tackled Maldon and Muckleford.

It’s not a lot of fun, however it does make an enormous difference to the ease and reliability with which the turnouts work.

Of course while in the area, any loose bolts are tightened.

The gang also found time to tidying up some fallen branches that came down in a recent storm.

While all this has been happening on our Railway, our little excavator went for a quick holiday down to the Yarra Valley to stack just under 600 concrete sleepers that were recently released during a rail upgrade project around Melbourne. The sleepers had been tipped out of trucks and required neat stacking before they could be truck up here. We’d like to thank the Yarra Valley Railway for their help in this project and for the use of their site for a few days while we stacked them up. We only need another 15,000 or so now to be able to replace all our timber with concrete!

Given tomorrow’s hot weather and various other requirements, there won’t be a workday, so stay home by the air-conditioning!

The gang will be back in action on Tuesday, replacing turnout timbers in Castlemaine Yard from 8.30am, there’s a few to do and they’re in very awkward locations so this will likely take up Thursday and Friday also.