Today ended up being surprisingly successful, with a further 320m of 80lb rail installed, taking us from Boundary Trk to the next curve along the UP leg.

Unfortunately, there are a few pics, but for some technical reason following an update of an app, it’s not allowing photos to upload.

Besides completing that rerailing, we’ve also made a good head start on Thursday’s work, with the spikes now removed in the down leg also.

Friday’s gang managed to prepare and distribute a very good number of fishplates, allowing today to flow as smoothly as it did. Unfortunately, it really does all come down to the preparation.

Thursday’s crew will meet at Maldon at 8am or out at Boundary Track from 8.30am.

Today was yet another extremely successful day, with another 425m of rail installed.

It was all very standard stuff, with the slight difference of using the little digger, nothing wrong with the big digger, it’s just temporary required elsewhere.

The final 8 lengths of 80lb to reach Boundary Track seemed to be installed in almost record time, just after morning tea.

So, with such a strong head start, knocking over through Boundary Track itself was the only natural next step!

Before long, the down leg had been installed through the roadway, and the closure was cut back into the 60lb.

A long time readers of this blog might remember we did ourselves a big favour in this crossing some years ago, when we re-sleepered it with concrete, this made it a very easy job today.

Both rails through the roadway are now 80lb, all secured up, backfilled and open for road traffic again… whenever that may be, in all our years the only cars most of us have ever seen there are us out working nearby, but a few cyclists and walkers make good use of it.

We’ve still got a fair amount to come back and complete, however, it’s now in a much better state of health. As such, we’ll continue working on down the hill next week.

Tomorrow’s crew will be a little smaller than usual, however, it’ll focus on dropping out fishplates, bolts and generally preparing for Tuesday’s gang to knock out another good few lengths. Meeting at Boundary Track from 8.30am

Today saw us achieve a bit more than we expected, with the high leg of Curve 13 now fully rerailed and clipped up.

We had actually done most of the hard work already for this, with all the timber sleepers adapted to take pandrol clips, so it was just a big day of unclip then re-clip.

It’s come up looking very smart, also releasing a good number of fishplates for our other re-railing.

Today’s crew of 9, very comfortably knocked over this task of re-railing 190m, finding time to clean up and sort all the jewellery and even stack more sleeper plates onto pallets!!

Our bolt delivery has now arrived, meaning we can get back into normal rerailing on Thursday. Meeting Maldon 8am out by Boundary Track from 8.30am

Today was certainly a mix bag. Beginning, we installed the closure that we didn’t quite get around to yesterday.

Then we moved onto the task of marking up the failed timber sleepers (of which we have been quite ruthless, as we really don’t want to back here within the next 5 years) we’ve marked up 120 so far and that’s only to where we’ve rerailed both legs.

We’ve begun dropping out sleeper plates, however, only around a pallets worth, which got us a few hundred metres up one leg. Then, off to Muckleford to pull more plates out of the stack and onto pallets.

Now we know it’s generally the Tuesday gang that revel in this particular task, so we made sure we left enough plates unstacked for Tuesday’s crew, as we’d hate for them to miss out.

However, in the afternoon, between rain showers, we set about getting ready a short section of track that we’re going to re-re-rail (that’s not a typo).

Many years ago, the high leg of this curve was rerailed in 80lb. However, we’ve since rerailed everything else around it in 94lb, leaving just the few hundred metres of the high leg of this curve as 80lb, so to correct that, we’d always planned on swapping over to 94lb.

We’re running a little short on fishplates for the current rerailing, so by doing this swap over next week, with the longer 94lb rails, we’ll get a good number to allow us to proceed out past Boundary Track. It does feel a bit like robbing Peter to pay Paul, but it’s a job we were always going to do sometime. This just brings it forward a year or so.

We may also end up re-rerailing a few other sections towards Maldon in the coming months for the same reason, however they’ll focus very much on areas that would benefit long term from this treatment.

Tuesday’s crew will hopefully knock this over. If not, then at least make a good start. Meeting at Maldon at 8am or on site (Muckleford) from 8.30am.