Concrete Sleepers

Today we had a good crack at installing full depth concrete sleepers into the track, the chosen location was the old tip crossing near Maldon.

It was all undertaken by lifting the rail 150mm to match the increase in height of the concrete sleepers, that way, we’re not digging into the roadbed.

It didn’t take us long at all to get the hang of things, we’ve learnt a lot and no doubt will learn a lot more in time!

At the end of the rather leisurely and very much experimental day, we had installed 48 concrete sleepers, fixed suffiently good ramps at either end (to get to the concrete sleeper height) and given the section a bit of a jack and pack as requires to make it good enough for trains to use – it needs ballast to do much more with now.

Anyone with a keen eye will note that we’re very short on ballast now. Once we’ve completed any significant length of this, we’ll be chasing ballast very desperately, however at this stage the critical element is replacing the rapidly failing timber sleepers, to ensure we keep running trains into the future, we can keep the speed of trains down as required if the concrete sleepered track is a bit rough and lacking ballast, however we can’t safely run trains if the timber sleepers deteriorate much more.

Tomorrow will be in the same vein, however focusing on getting some of the massive stockpiles of sleepers at Maldon out to site. Meeting at Maldon from 8am, we’ll be jumping between Maldon Yard and Bendigo Road most of the day