Fix it week / Stats

We’ve had a very good week of fixing things, with the exception of the Takeuchi, everything is back in action. The Takeuchi hitch is off at a place in Bendigo being repaired, it’ll be at least another week away.

We’ve had a chance to finally crunch some numbers on the recent works, with some stat’s below.

In a brief overview, during the past 7 week, we’ve installed 2269 concrete sleepers in place of around 2350 timber sleepers (the old spacings were very inconsistent), all over a distance of 1.73kms (starting at Curve 20 and finishing at Pipeline Crossing). During that 7 weeks, due to Public Holidays and the like, we only actually used 31 of the 35 days available – not a bad effort at all.

It is interesting to note, the timber sleepers removed give an excellent indication of the impending situation this section of the railway was facing – from the recent work, we only recovered:

• 13% of them as A grade sleepers – which are good enough to re-use in our Station Yards
• 37% of them as B Grade sleepers – which are still solid enough timber, however they’re all second/third hand and so heavily spike killed (multiple holes), any re-use of these would only see a couple of years life, if any, as most of these were already showing signs of cracking / rotting in the spike areas
• 20% of them as C Grade sleepers (20%) – they’re still in one piece but not good enough to even consider re-use (certainly weren’t doing any good in the track)
• 30% of them came out as broken sleepers

At any point in time, we would aim to only have a 25% failed timber rate in the track (1 in 4 nearing/needing replacement), however this section (at 50%) was certainly not in the best of the shape, one of the main reasons it has been the first to receive this treatment.

However even more impressive, we hope, is that we’ve finally worked out how to use modern technology sufficiently to not only take a video, but get it up here too!

This starts at Pipeline Crossing and runs through to the Maldon end of these works, hopefully helping to make this a little more clear to those who don’t know the railway in quite so much detail as we do – we hope the quality is okay enough to show the hard work – we’ll try to work out how to improve all these things in due course – at this stage we’re more than busy just getting the work done.

It should be remembered that all the concrete sleepers you’ll see in this video were installed in only 7 weeks!

We’re extremely proud of this little section, and all being well, by the middle of the year, we’ll be extremely close to having all the way from Maldon to Pipeline Crossing completed like this.

It’s not quite finished yet, we’re yet to bring back the shoulders and clean out the drains, however that’ll be pretty high on the list once the Takeuchi is back in action.

Next week, will be a complete change of pace, we’ll be down by Winters Flat Bridge, re-railing!. We’ll begin by re-railing the section from the end of the Midland Highway Crossing Curve to the Bridge, so we can get back into the swing of it before tackling the Bridge.

Monday’s gang will meet at Maldon at 8am or out on site by Midland Hwy Crossing from 8.45am.