Tamper and Reg

After what continued to be an intense week for V/Line and their contractors, the section of track over the Midland Hwy Arch bridge was reinstated and finished off.

Wednesday saw the track rebuilt, and due to a few design changes our track was lifted to give a greater ballast depth over the arch of the bridge – this didn’t really impact us, it was more about the longevity of the water proofing on the bridge structure below.

However, the raise was significant enough to need the approaches lifting, meaning a tamper and regulator paid us a visit.

Several passes were made from Rowe Street through to the North end of Forest Creek Bridge. With some locations coming up just over 200mm, meaning a lot of ballast was added.

In anticipation of this, V/line also replaced 40 of our remaining timber sleepers with concrete. These were mainly in the section between the bridges and a few back towards Rowe St.

A few videos follow of the tamper and reg in action.

As always, it’s very impressive to watch the ability of the machines and the operators, and the end result was very impressive.

The end result of all this tamping was pretty impressive.

The following day the once the welding, bolting, and clean up were fully completed, it looked a million dollars.

At the end of this project, with the combined effort from us and V/Line 152 sleepers in this section were replaced, leaving only 28 timber sleepers between Rowe St and the Arch Bridge – all outside of the ‘fouling’ area so we can change these at our leisure. There are about 8 timber sleepers remaining over Forest Creek Bridge. However, they’ll last at least another 10 years.

It’s a pretty landmark moment for the VGR, beside tamping, foliage, bolt tightening, etc… the maintenance here has dropped right off, and the track is now extremely solid – an insight into what we’re heading towards all the way through to Maldon.

In completely unrelated matters, the concrete floor in the loco shed at Castlemaine is now ready to use (in fact, we did some digger maintenance there earlier in the week, and it was Marvellous). Fill has been placed around the edges to make it safe to walk and use. 

As time, resources, money etc… permit, we’ll continue with this work, hopefully by the end of this year the second pit will be ready to go and at least some of the annex will be concreted.

Next week’s workday on Monday is cancelled (public holiday) and Tuesday will be about getting the last of the equipment through to Maldon – as such, no real workday will occur. Check back closer for Wednesday/Thursday info.