Sleepers

Today was very momentus, we’ve now installed all the concrete sleepers requires you 100% concrete sleepers Maldon to Pipeline Crossing.

It’s a long way that we’ve resleepered this year – 4200m, which is over half way to Muckleford and 1/4 of our overall track length! It’s been a massive year.

They’re in, the hardest, most labour intensive, the most time and resource consuming part of the resleepering work for this section is now behind us!

We set out to resleeper from the curve pictured above to Pipeline Crossing this year… and we’ve well and truly exceeded that ambitious target. It’s been a slog. However, the work we’ve put in this year will have dividends for decades. The job is far from over, we still need to complete through to Castlemaine (although that seems far more realistic and much less daunting now), we still need to obtain and distribute many many thousands of tonnes of ballast and get in a production tamping crew to get the track up to a standard that will be sustainable for our limited resources.

We’ll do a piece closer to the end of the year with the details of our plans for next year, however they focus very heavily of resleepering Pipeline Crossing to Muckleford Yard, a distance of 3200m, which based on this year’s experience we should be comfortably able to achieve. Funding the work will however remain a struggle – please reach out if you’re able to help.

We’re actually not quite as ‘done’ with today’s little task as the above may read, approximately 40 sleepers still need their final clips pulled, we’ve got a mountain of clean-up to do and we need to run through from Curve 21 to Curve 20 fixing a few geometry issues we didn’t get to during the resleepering – all should be achieved this week however if we can get enough people on the ground on Thursday and Friday.

Thursday’s gang will meet at Maldon at 8am.