Odd Jobs

It’s been a bit of an odd jobs week so far.

It began with a bit of work at Castlemaine Turntable, getting the rails perfectly aligned has always been a very interesting challenge.

It turns out that ever since its installation here back in the 90s, it’s been missing one of its side straps.

The shiny piece of steel you can see above. 

This strap simply prevents the table moving relatively to its rocker pivot below. A few decades of accumulated grim and it was nie on impossible to see the missing strap – it was only one old bloke’s dim dark distant memory of installation day that got us to looking and thinking.. if the table had moved, even a few mm, maybe that would explain the odd alignment we’ve been experiencing.

Well, it didn’t take long to find that this was infact the issue. With a quick tug from the digger, she was back to the correct position, and it was lining up almost perfectly.

Given that we’d had several efforts over the years to correct this issue, we did have to undo one of the gauge adjustments we’d made as it was now causing some misalignment – thankfully just this one rail and it was the location previously adjusted.

Before too long, it was released, and with a little persuasion, it jumped back to where it was happy. Once fixed down, it was tested in all its various combinations and found to be aligning with the various runoff roads very well.

While in attendance, various other maintenance activities occurred on the turntable, to ensure hassle free operation. Tightening, lubricating etc…

It’s a bit of an odd claim to fame, but with the possible exception of the turntable at  Dynon, Castlemaine Turntable is probably the most used table in the state. It gets used on average about 3 times a week, multiple times each day it is used, so it’s a remarkably low maintenance piece of infrastructure.

Once that job was behind us, we headed out to Donkey Farm Trk to keep dropping out concrete sleepers, we’ve dropped out approximately half of the way along the straight to the crossing, just a lot more to go! This work will continue tomorrow, meeting Maldon at 8am or near Donkey Farm Trk from 8.30am.