In much more kind weather, we completed the re-railing of the straight at Pipeline Xing.

Here we see Clive busily extracting dog spikes.

A view of the 60lb de-dogged and de-screwed looking in the Down Direction.

An overall shot looking down of the job done. You can see the ‘ramp’ that we make under the old 60lb so that it comes up to the same height as the 80lb.

Although we had a very successful attempt at inserting a concrete sleeper with our new grab, it could have been a bit gentler on the sleeper.

So today we’re trying out some pads for the teeth of the grabs.

To test it out we’re putting in a concrete sleeper right next to the big red shed.

Edit – 1730 6/12/17

The pads or boots for the grab worked very nicely, few little tweaks but overall excellent results.

And just to prove it did actually put a sleeper in:

Well big progress was made on Saturday.

Using steel sleepers with quick and easy pandrol fastenings, that we’ve had in our stores for years, just waiting for a use.

Using the new grab the sleepers were laid out, lined easily by hand, rails placed on top with pandrol lugs and fastenings installed.

This process proved to be extremely rapid and gave great results, with around 80 m of track knocked together in less than a day.

Below are some action shots of the day’s work.

Using the new grab on the excavator to lift the rails onto the sleepers – previously there would have been a lot of baring required.

All in all it was an excellent day’s work, keep an eye out here for details of further work days.

Today we put in our first timber replacement concrete sleeper, we’ve got others on the railway around Castlemaine but this was the first put into track as a timber replacement.

It is very much an experiment, to see if our axel loads and lower ballast profile can support them.

It was relatively easy to insert and install, so fingers crossed.