Castlemaine Day 5

We’ve had a big week, but it has been very successful.

We’ve replaced 138 timber sleepers with concretes, 18 point timbers, removed a small mountain’s worth of foliage, removed a good number of small top defects and given the area a pretty in depth tidy up.

This morning began with a good amount of tamping, correcting a few tips and minor faults, nothing major, but it certainly makes everything look much nicer.

A general tidy up and clean around all the important mechanical components was a big focus of the day.

Once the tamping was completed, it was onto boxing up and ballast tidying.

It’s come up looking very tidy.

A lot of manual work was undertaken on the turnouts to make them look much more presentable and, more importantly, make inspection of the fastenings and timbers much easier.

Quite a bit of additional foliage removal was undertaken. This will hopefully mean we don’t have any major hassles here for a good few years now, it was becoming very overgrown.

As we inadvertently could have altered all points, signals and locking at this end of the yard, a full check and some minor adjustments were made to ensure everything was working correctly.

A keen eye might also note that a spectical has again been fitted to the outer home signal – the coloured glass bit.

We’re getting towards our overall goal of getting 100% concrete sleepers into this section, only about 150 timber sleepers remain now, right out to Rowe Street, a few more Vline shutdowns, and we’ll be there.

By the end of today, the Vline contractors were making excellent headway, getting the track back in place up at their worksite, they plan on having the job completed tomorrow. VLine have ensured that any timber sleepers in our track that required lifting for these works have gone back as concrete, which helps us out greatly, it’s not a massive number but it’s certainly not insignificant.

It’s been a busy week, had the weather been kinder we would have been able to install a further 50 or so concrete sleepers, however all considered we’ve done very well and we’ve certainly made good use of the opportunity getting the shrubbery back under control.

We’ve handed the site back to Vline, there’s only a few days left of the occupation with test trains running on Wednesday and normal trains back on Thursday.

Next week will see us sort out our now rather massive mess that’s spread far and wide around Castlemaine Yard. Tuesday’s crew will meet at Castlemaine Depot from 8am.