On what began as a somewhat dreary day, it proves to be very pleasant and extremely productive! Job one was adding in the extra gravel near the water column and giving it a good compact (the digger wheels are great for this).

It was the onto jacking, ballasting and packing the last little bit not completed yesterday.

It didn’t take too long at all and that was completed.

That was proceeded by lots of tidying up, boxing up and rebuilding the roadway, this time much narrower and clearly defined.

The area where the old oil store track was, was compacted and levelled, improving its appearance enormously.

It’s come up looking the best it has in many many years.

We had enough time left over to stack a few more loose sleepers into bundles, only a few more hours and we’ll have this task completed!

The biggest news of the day was that we finally managed to acquire a fuel filter for the gang truck (which has been parked up here for 2 weeks awaiting a filter… we’ve heard lots of excuses as to why one filter has been so hard to get… yet another supplier managed it in less than 2 days.).

More to the point, it now goes again and and we’ve given it a good clean out in the cab.

Anyhow, after the extremely intense program of works over the past 4 months, there will be a bit of a slowing in things for a while, which the staff take some leave.

As such, tomorrow’s workday has been cancelled and there will be no workdays next week at all – the following week Tuesday and Thursday will function as normal then from the week after (July 15th on, things will be back to normal, Tuesday/Thursday/Friday workdays).

We had a bit of a change of pace today, with a few other jobs around Maldon completed, the main one being the tightening or replacement of any loose bolts in 1 and 2 roads.

6 failed timber sleepers in 2 road have been replaced and tamped.

The final closure rail to complete the work in the pic above was cut in (into 2 road, to replace a very corroded old rail end).

We did then begin lifting, ballasting (using the old gravel) and tamping – still a lot to go tomorrow but a good chunk is now done and tidied up.

It’s starting to look very snazzy, a bit too good really…

Tomorrow’s work should see this tidied up nicely. Meeting at Maldon from 8am.

In a fairly logical follow on from yesterday, we bolted up the strings of 60lb rail today and then proceeded to clip it all up.

It didn’t take us overly long to clip it all up, giving a very solid appearance very quickly.

We spent quite some time working on getting the curve looking nice, it will probably still need a tweak after we reinstate the gravel but it’s more than adequate for the job, and slightly less sharp than the previous turnout arrangement.

We’re very happily with how it’s come up. Keeping in mind this is relatively temporary as it’ll need significant tweaking when we replace the turnout later in the year as it’ll be a slightly different angle.

Tomorrow’s crew will be starting around 8.30am at Maldon, we’ll be jumping around onto a few jobs tomorrow to tidy up a few loose ends ahead of the end of the week long occupations.

After having so much fun destructing things last week, we were champing at the bit to do some more today.

Today’s victim was the old trolley road / oil store turnout at Maldon, it’s time was also up.

We managed to take an extremely small number of pictures of the interesting bits, however it was a real hodge podge of tierods, steel sleepers, rotten timber sleepers and some very corroded rail.

And like magic.. the concrete sleepers and replacement rails are in!

This is somewhat of a temporary job as it’ll need adjusting quite a bit when the turnout (the one the photo is being taken from) is renewed later this year.

It certainly changes the appearance of the place however, it actually has a much cleaner look – less cluttered.

These are actually from Fridays efforts, however some slightly improved gate holder openers were installed, these are really high tech, using a snap hook to connect a chain to the gate, preventing it blowing open. Given that when we arrived today the D shackles had been undone and chains unthreaded, we highly suggest if you’re not certain of how snap hooks work – please save these pictures to your phone as a future reference and or google ‘Snap Hooks’.

Tomorrow’s crew will be meeting at Maldon from 8am, where we’ll assemble the track bits and pieces laid out today.