Tamping

Today was an action-packed day of tamping the recent sleeper insertions and a few other minor defects – we did a bit of this yesterday too, especially around the depot at Castlemaine.

We did a few other odd jobs while out and about like re-covering the diodes at the end of the flashing light sections.

After the tamping work came a good thorough ballast scrape to tidy things up, which it has certainly done.

We then continued on with our tamping endeavours, correcting various minor dips and twists, all of which seemed to be in awkward locations – which is probably why they existed as its also a little challenging to successfully squeeze these up without pulling all the signalling gear away, but, we managed and didn’t cause any issues.

We then moved on to a quite long bit of settlement by Winters Flat, it’s happened before and no doubt will again, it’s just the nature of certain embankments – probably a result of the relatively so so fill available back during original construction in 1883/1884.

The truck was very successfully bogged and then just as easily extracted – it wouldn’t be winter without a bogging – we think this was the first of the year.

We had one little bit of finish off by Pipeline Crossing – we’d been waiting for the clipping up to address this, and now that’s all complete, we thought it best to tick it off the list while we were passing.

While waiting for the little digger to make its way home, we unloaded the equipment we’ve been using over the past few weeks, ready for next week’s adventures – which are yet to be firmly locked in so watch this space.

We’ve had a good run so far in August, with a good few bits and pieces ticked off.

We’ve got a fair amount of work coming up in the Muckleford area over the coming months, so that’ll likely become a bit of a focus.