Today was certainly a mix bag. Beginning, we installed the closure that we didn’t quite get around to yesterday.

Then we moved onto the task of marking up the failed timber sleepers (of which we have been quite ruthless, as we really don’t want to back here within the next 5 years) we’ve marked up 120 so far and that’s only to where we’ve rerailed both legs.

We’ve begun dropping out sleeper plates, however, only around a pallets worth, which got us a few hundred metres up one leg. Then, off to Muckleford to pull more plates out of the stack and onto pallets.

Now we know it’s generally the Tuesday gang that revel in this particular task, so we made sure we left enough plates unstacked for Tuesday’s crew, as we’d hate for them to miss out.

However, in the afternoon, between rain showers, we set about getting ready a short section of track that we’re going to re-re-rail (that’s not a typo).

Many years ago, the high leg of this curve was rerailed in 80lb. However, we’ve since rerailed everything else around it in 94lb, leaving just the few hundred metres of the high leg of this curve as 80lb, so to correct that, we’d always planned on swapping over to 94lb.

We’re running a little short on fishplates for the current rerailing, so by doing this swap over next week, with the longer 94lb rails, we’ll get a good number to allow us to proceed out past Boundary Track. It does feel a bit like robbing Peter to pay Paul, but it’s a job we were always going to do sometime. This just brings it forward a year or so.

We may also end up re-rerailing a few other sections towards Maldon in the coming months for the same reason, however they’ll focus very much on areas that would benefit long term from this treatment.

Tuesday’s crew will hopefully knock this over. If not, then at least make a good start. Meeting at Maldon at 8am or on site (Muckleford) from 8.30am.

Today was certainly a mix bag. Beginning, we installed the closure that we didn’t quite get around to yesterday.

Then we moved onto the task of marking up the failed timber sleepers (of which we have been quite ruthless, as we really don’t want to back here within the next 5 years) we’ve marked up 120 so far and that’s only to where we’ve rerailed both legs.

We’ve begun dropping out sleeper plates, however, only around a pallets worth, which got us a few hundred metres up one leg. Then, off to Muckleford to pull more plates out of the stack and onto pallets.

Now we know it’s generally the Tuesday gang that revel in this particular task, so we made sure we left enough plates unstacked for Tuesday’s crew, as we’d hate for them to miss out.

However, in the afternoon, between rain showers, we set about getting ready a short section of track that we’re going to re-re-rail (that’s not a typo).

Many years ago, the high leg of this curve was rerailed in 80lb. However, we’ve since rerailed everything else around it in 94lb, leaving just the few hundred metres of the high leg of this curve as 80lb, so to correct that, we’d always planned on swapping over to 94lb.

We’re running a little short on fishplates for the current rerailing, so by doing this swap over next week, with the longer 94lb rails, we’ll get a good number to allow us to proceed out past Boundary Track. It does feel a bit like robbing Peter to pay Paul, but it’s a job we were always going to do sometime. This just brings it forward a year or so.

We may also end up re-rerailing a few other sections towards Maldon in the coming months for the same reason, however they’ll focus very much on areas that would benefit long term from this treatment.

Tuesday’s crew will hopefully knock this over. If not, then at least make a good start. Meeting at Maldon at 8am or on site (Muckleford) from 8.30am.

Today saw us insert a staggering 520m of 80lb rail, a total of 13 x 40m lengths.

Unfortunately, we did manage to get quite soaked in this morning’s rain, even having to sit out about an hour until things settled down.

However just after morning tea, the skies dried up and we got to work.

We’ve certainly got nicely back into the swing of rerailing, all day the clipping up crew were hot on the heels of the digger swapping over the rail.

We didn’t need to cut any rails today, we just had to move two sleepers very slightly, to work with the joints.

By day’s end, we were well over 2/3rds of the way towards Boundary Track along this leg. Only around 8 lengths to go. However, as we’ve greatly over-achieved today, we haven’t got our delivery of track bolts yet, so we’ll have to hold off getting any more rail in until they arrive next week.

However, tomorrow’s crew has still got plenty to do, the closure back to 60lb still needs to go in, we can begin the exciting task of dropping out sleeper plates as well as beginning to prepare the next section for rerailing.

Meeting out by Sawmill Road from 8.30am.

Today was largely another rerailing preparation day, with almost all the fishplates along the down leg dropped out, greased and bolts dropped out, and rails moved up ready for insertion.

It’s now all set for a big effort to knock over a large chuck of this straight next week, weather permitting!

Although we focused more heavily on the prep today, we did still make a start on the Down leg, with 100m worth of 80lb rail installed and joined back into the old 60lb.

We’ve started square with the other leg and then installed a 20m rail to give an even 1/2 rail stagger to the joints. This was almost impossible to achieve in the other section, given the range of rail lengths. However, we’ve got very uniform lengths of 80lb, so it’s much more manageable here.

Given that we’ve got a public holiday on Tuesday next week, we’ll be having the day off. However, things should be normal on Thursday and Friday if the weather forecast improves. We’ll put an update up here on Wednesday to confirm the details.