Another 22 sleepers installed today, mainly concrete but a few timber as well.
After a good tamp and ballast scrape this section is looking very smart.
Next week will be a big week, as we start 9km of rail recovery! Work starts Tuesday, with any extra hands very welcome. Meeting Maldon 8am.
Today saw a very old section of poor track corrected. This very short section between Maclise Street Crossing and the pedestrian crossing has been on our watch list for some years, finally showing signs in December that it was due for renewal.
As the location was noting short of awkward, we decided it best to do a total sleeper replacement rather than individual sleepers.
As it was largely buried, we were presently surprised to find that several of the sleepers were still really quite good, but while in there it would have been foolish not to replace them.
Given the location of the conduits for the track circuits, we elected to do all the replacements from within the 5 foot, an easy task when the gap is large enough. We even cleaned out all the ballast to make the job easier.
We haven’t as yet ballasted or tamped this section, a job for tomorrow.
The sleepers near the crossing took all morning, but we did manage to insert a further 9 concrete sleepers and 14 timber sleepers into the nearby curves, just as spot replacements for life expired timber.
We used a mixture of timber and concrete sleepers, it’s a bit of a test to see how the concrete performs given the somewhat poor quality of the ballast here.
Similar tests have so far proved extremely successful, we’re fortunate that given our light axle loads, low speeds and relatively few trains, we can get by with installing concrete in lesser quality ballast with no issues. The timber is second hand, removed from near Muckleford where we’ve installed concrete, it’s of varying quality and we’re not likely to see more than 4-5 years of service, which is why we’re eager to see how the concrete will perform.
We’ve got another 20 sleepers to install tomorrow (we’ve already removed the old ones). All will need a tamp and the usual boxing up of the ballast etc…
It has been declared a day of total fire ban tomorrow (mainly due to wind), we will still be working however as we have no grinding, cutting or high fire risk tasks to undertake, we will look at finishing early if the weather turns out to be too bad.
Meeting at Maldon 7.45am or site from 8.30am.
It’s 2020 and we’ve hit the ground running.
The great wall of Castlemaine is now almost done! With a big effort today, securing the last of the rail and back filling, we now only have the top rail to be fitted.
By lunch time we’d fastened all the rails and began the filling (including the danger tape for the electricity).
It ended up looking pretty snazzy.
We even spent a good 10 minutes deciding how the top rail should be installed.
We will use old point rodding, sitting on an angle over the foot of the uprights. After much discussion and deliberation, all 4 of us decided this looked very neat and tidy and will leave a finished product with no sharp edges.
Thursday / Friday will be installing a mix of concrete and timber sleepers near Maclise St Crossing, where the old timber is starting to fail. Meeting Maldon 8am or site from 8.45am.
Well we set out to install as much of the rail in the retaining wall as possible today, the end result was greatly more than we had expected given the horrid weather.
We’ve completed all the full length runs of longitudinal rail strings, with only about 10 rails left to install in the higher section early in the new year.
The day began by unloading rail from the wagon stored on site, placing the first of the rails down and working out exactly how to ensure they stayed there while they were welded on.
Bruce and Colin were very quick to work out a very easy system with crow bars, which proved to work extremely well.
Bazz was chief welder, working very closely behind the bolting up and propping crews.
By morning tea we’d reached the north end with the first run of rail, which proved quite time consuming as we had all sorts of conduits and an NBN pit to negotiate, thankfully Project Manager Graeme and Rolf tackled this task.
Morning tea was spent using about the only decent shade available in this area of the Castlemaine Yard – next to an old oil tanker.
We had some cutting to do and although water is now on site we decided the fire truck was just as good as any… until we managed to break the hose reel. The effect was very spectacular and the gang were in no way complaining about the water spray, once we’d run the ute back and fourth to wet the area we reverted to the mains supply while the hose reel was fixed.
By lunch we’d done so well we were even able to sand over the last of the exposed conduits to make life much easier for the higher levels of rails.
Lunch was in the sturdy old Shunter’s Cabin, now equip with couch and bench!
After lunch and we really got into the swing of things, with it all coming together very quickly. In the end we just had to give up because of the heat and given the enormous effort put in by everyone, it was a well deserved early finish (only about 1/2 hour early mind). The new grabs proved invaluable in this task, the ability to move them so precisely made it very easy.
We’ve now got 6 longitudinal strings installed the full length, we still need to install another longitudinal string for half the length and then at least another for a quarter of the length. Something we should be able to achieve easily in the new year. Then we’ll be able to start back-filling and tidying up once that’s done.
That was the last workday for 2019! Tomorrow’s extreme heat, total fire ban and high fire danger seems like the universe’s way of telling us we’ve done enough for the year and we deserve an extra day off. (Civil Saturday on 21st Dec will NOT be running due to the same reason)
We look forward to seeing you all again in 2020, with gangs starting back on Tuesday 7th January. Thank-you once again to everyone who has come out and helped on the civil gangs this year – we just couldn’t have done it without you.
We would like to wish everyone a very safe and happy festive season – watch this space for the excitement that will be civil gangs 2020!
