Maldon Yard

We had an extremely successful day in Maldon Yard today.

We replaced 11 failed sleepers in 1 road.

A further 12 more in 3 road.

And we did a mountain of jacking and packing of the various little dips around the Yard.

The tipper even got a bit of action in cleaning up the old sleepers.

Thanks to Maldon’s very shallow ballast depth and underlying soft clay, its very susceptible to settlement, this is not an irregular task, however we really seemed to get it looking better this time, likely a benefit of the improvements to the drainage we did last year.

It all looks quite smart now, with everything tidied up.

The small section of 3 road we’ve worked on looks a million dollars, all levelled and tidily boxed up. When we get a spare month, we’ll attack the rest of the road. However, this is the high traffic end. The rest sees very little use and has a high number of steel sleepers.

And just to embarrass Mal, here’s a shot of him enjoying the first slice of cake, before promptly ensuring everyone else got a piece. We’re very lucky on track, we’ve got several people who bring along a fantastic treat for morning and afternoon tea, a big thankyou to the cooks at home for thinking of us!

Although not part of today’s work, these are the anchors we installed on Tuesday, Victrack kindly donated us some brand new 94lb anchors some time ago and we’ve finally been able to make good use of the.

Tomorrow’s crew will be starting at Maldon at 8am and then heading out the track a little, doing a bit more tamping work, lifting a few low spots between Maldon and Muckleford.