Thursday (tomorrow), we’ll be installing additional sleepers between Rowe St. And Maclise St crossings. Meeting at Castlemaine Depot at 8am, then out by Rowe Street from 8.15am.
Tuesday’s report:
We had quite a successful day on Tuesday, with 61 concrete sleepers installed between Rowe and Maclise Streets. We had both diggers in action, 1 pulling sleepers, and 1 inserting, which worked very well.
The impressive quality of the timber removed can be seen, unfortunately they’re all aging, we’ve replaced the worst of the worst and ensure any patches / clusters have a concrete in the middle to hold gauge, as yet gauge hadn’t begun to widen around here, but it was only a matter of time.
We’re yet to tamp up, however, we have collected all the old timber and stacked it out of the way for disposal, making the job look a bit tidier.
We found a nice tree for smoko, which came with its own lounge chair! Needless to say, it was put to good use! Thank you, whoever decided that tree needed a comfy chair!
Now the reason for the delay in this update, once packed up on Tuesday, the big digger headed home to Maldon, only making it as far as Donkey Farm Track, before losing all power to the transmission, a blown fuse was found and a cooked solenoid, however even with them replaced, she still wouldn’t move!
So we had to clear it from the track, as the location it failed was not even slightly suitable to attempting to walk it off.
So the tipper to the rescue, we’ve got a system of a solid draw bar for emergency towing on board all our big machines and until Tuesday, we’ve never needed them, however as per all the trials, it worked perfectly. The brakes on the digger still worked normally, just no drive, so the truck provided the go power and cradle for the implements, and a nice slow trip back to Maldon saw everything returned home safely.
We spent a good few hours going over it today, we’re not quite back in action yet. Hopefully, it’s a relatively easy fix once we find the problem. Unfortunately, this is once again an attack of the aging machinery.
On a positive note, the telehandler’s back functioning correctly, a series of dirty electrical connections kept giving us intermittent travel faults, which we’ve finally been able to replicate and now eliminate, it took a long time, but we can now just about draw up a wiring diagram for that beast from memory!
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