Biscuits

Although we have technically installed all the sleepers between the crossings in the past few weeks, we have only to date clipped up every second sleepers.

We chose to do this to speed up the process and to mechanise clipping up the bulk of the fastclip sleepers.

It was a very simple process of wandering through dropping in biscuits, and using the digger to adjust any not quite in the correct location.

Any cleaning/tweaking/adjusting was also done during this pass. Meaning when we hire a fastclip head (book in the week starting 28th July) we can just go through and clip up in an efficient pass.

There was a bit of digger downtime where old sleepers were stacked and all the unclipped sleepers were given a squeeze to just make sure they were hard up.

We did extremely well today, getting all the way to the up end of Curve 16 – leaving around a third still requiring biscuits – comfortably only one day’s work, we installed around 2600 biscuits today!

Depending on exactly how well the hydraulic clipper goes, this method will probably prove to save us almost weeks of labour pulling on the clips manually.

We’ll finish this task next Thursday, however Monday’s crew will meet at Maldon at 8am and head out on another exciting adventure.