We’ve made it to Donkey Farm Track

We’re there! It’s a done deal, the final 38 concretes installed today, taking our total of concretes installed between Pipeline and Donkey Farm Trk to 1,973 – slightly under the roughly calculated 2000 sleepers we’d need (pretty close though!)

Today’s focus was very much about backing up Tuesday’s and Yesterday’s effort, bundling timber sleepers and getting them home.

Most were already in bundles from yesterday, only the last 5 or so needed making up but heaps needed strapping.

We had every intention of running them back trolley load at a time – however we got a much better recovery rate than expected (they’re still pretty average in all fairness however!) – which resulted in having 33 packs to transfer to Maldon.

This many packs called for a little more muscle – the stars just happened to align and a loco was readied for the task.

It did however need to travel to Maldon to collect the wagons, so we tidied up the ballast made the job look tidier in the meantime.

All the steel and timber sleepers on site were loaded up and fair to say once we’d basically filled 3 well wagons – we decided we’re very glad we didn’t try moving these home with the diggers.

Once it was loaded off the slow trip pushing it back to Maldon was made – quite the load.

While the train was away we actually broke out the tamping head – as the grabs just don’t squeeze the rock ballast in hard enough – and down by the crossing is mainly rock ballast.

We’re very happy with how the levels turned out, with no ramp required to achieve the correct height through the crossing. (This pic is actually before the tamping, and it looked even better after).

With us out of the way, the loco made its way home – this loco is currently on loan from Steamrail Victoria – thanks Steamrail – it’s been a very handy machine while our Y class is out of action for heavy maintenance.

It has been a very successful exercise getting down to here – with only about another 1.75kms or 2300 concrete sleepers to get to Muckleford – it seems very achievable now – but probably not all this year. Hopefully we’ll get another few hundred metres completed this year but for the next few weeks we need to get on top of the usual machine maintenance and the like.

Monday crew will meet at Maldon at 8am and sort out what is now a few extremely full and messy truck/train loads.