It was just that sort of day.

Great fun was had at Muckleford, separating a big pile of various steel goodies combined with mud, ballast and general mess.

It was all in aid of getting more sleeper plates onto pallets ready for the next leg near Boundary Track.

However, the great innovation of today was the sorting table! It took us a few incarnations to get right, however we’re now very happy with it.

It holds a bucket’s worth of stuff to sort and can be easily scraped underneath to remove the ballast/dirt mixture. We also found if this is scraped out regularly, you can easily recover anything that might fall through without much scratching around.

As well as cleaning and stacking 6 pallets worth of plates, we’ve separated all the smaller items into discrete piles, which will make collection later a much easier task! We’re quite happy with this contraption and no doubt we’ll be back doing this next Friday, to get any more plates – once we’ve dropped out this lot and recovered the pallets.

Tuesday’s workday will be dropping these out, starting at Boundary Trk from 8.15am, no need to meet at Maldon.

It was a bit of a long boring day, however all dogspikes are now driven in (into holes drilled yesterday and today), all the way from Boundary Trk to Rifle Range Bridge, along the UP leg. Just all of the other leg and then down to Brown Street to go!

The plan was to use the excavator to tamp up the section Boundary Trk to Sawmill Rd, while the spiking was occurring. However, the tamper had other ideas, deciding after about 20mins in that one it’s tynes would rather crack off its weld and stop working. If it’s not one thing it’s another!!!

Once that was done, collecting the old timber sleepers was undertaken between Sawmill Rd and Boundary Trk, with a little more to go, then it’ll look quite neat and tidy again.

The offending part is now down at the Castlemaine workshop for repair when they get time.

The digger was instead diverted to dropping out concrete sleepers from Boundary Trk down the hill until we ran out, approximately 160 were dropped out and roughly another 100 are needed to finish down to Rifle Range, however there are plenty there now to keep us busy for a good while, however we do need to complete the spiking of the down leg first.

At the end of the day, we ran the digger through to Muckleford, so we can begin sorting through the piles of mess to collect enough sleeper plates to do the down leg next week, we’ll be setting us a sieve table to hopefully help reduce the back breaking bending over. Meeting at Muckleford from 8.15am.

A rather successful day today, with the little digger seemingly proving itself, despite a flat outer tyre (which is irrelevant on rail), it didn’t cause us much trouble, oil leaks seemed to be fixable and generally it’s performance was good, so a good start.

We managed to achieve a lot, with all sleeper plates dropped and inserted for the UP leg between Boundary Trk and Rifle Range Bridge, spikes have also been dropped out, ready for drilling and spiking to begin on Thursday.

These pics don’t show a lot. However, the pleasant afternoon sun made Boundary Track a very enjoyable place to be at knock-off time.

Thursday crew will again meet directly at Boundary Trk from 8.15am.

We’ve put the digger through its paces today, with a trip up to Maldon and back to Boundary Trk.

We’ve managed to blow a tyre and develop a significant leak in a hydraulic hose in that process, so it’s all back to normal!!

We’ll be meeting at Boundary Track from 8.15am tomorrow, no need to meet at Maldon, just straight to site.