Castlemaine Depot

We had a bit of a change of pace today, making up some new track rather than just fixing up old stuff.

It’s a run-off road for Castlemaine Turtable.

The logic of it is pretty clear from the pics, lining up with the 2nd set of roads that head into the loco shed.

As time and resources become available this can be extended back towards the ashpit, and when we get really wealthy we can consider getting back over the ashpit! However that’ll be a way off.

We spent a lot of time getting the levels close enough that we only did a minimum dig and didn’t need to do much lifting to achieve final height, as we don’t have much of a budget for this sort of work currently.

We did, however, need to keep the road access, so once the track was built and packed, we did drop in a few tipper loads of gravel.

We had to test it of course… the bit off the roadway will hold a Y class exactly – we could say we planned it, but it is a complete fluke!

We had a lot of trouble getting nice alignment with the turntable, we’ll have a bit more of a tweak on Thursday morning to see if we can improve it.

Thursday’s crew will meet at Castlemaine Depot from 8am, we’ve got a few odd jobs in the morning, then we’ll run a works train through to Maldon to clear the civil wagons out of Castlemaine Yard ahead of train running returning on Friday 7th.