Well, after what feels like an eternity of waiting for gaps in the rain, we made good headway today, with the last of the sleepers plates inserted and the last of the dril completed, in the recently rerailed section.

Thankfully we had to stack the plates first thing this morning, much to everyones delight and then scrapping the mud off helped get everyone well and truly in the mood.

However before long they’d been distributed and inserted under the track, with the tamper running hot on the heels of the inserters.

The drilling and spike standing team moved along at a great pace getting everything ready for spiking up tomorrow.

And while all that was happening more jewellery collection occurred, leaving only about 1km of jewellery to pick up now.

As the jewellery collection finished before the drilling, we even replaced 3 failed timber sleepers with some concretes we had stored nearby (we would have done more, however we only had 3 at hand).

Tomorrow, we’ll meet out on site (where the diggers are parked about 1km east of Muckleford) from 8.15am, where we’ll drive all the spikes, pick up jewellery and possibly even start inserting more concrete sleepers.

Sorry about the small break in communication over the past week, however everything is set to go for tomorrow. We’ll be meeting at Maldon at 7.45am then at Muckleford from 8.15am, to stack the last of the sleepers onto pallets and then all being well, get them out and under the track.

Last Friday ended up being a very successful day, with an enormous number of spikes driven, almost 2kms worth.

We brought out the old spiking hammer and trolley as the new one had developed an issue, however, that ended up being a very simple fix and so we set both to work, knocking it over in record time.

Once we’d stood the last of the spikes, it was really over to the 2 teams on the spiking hammers, so the rest of us grabbed the little digger with bucket and began collecting the jewellery. So far we’ve picked up everything from Sawmill Road almost all the way to curve 11, around 2.5kms, which was a lot of bending over!

Unfortunately today ended up being a bit of a wasted day… the rain just got heavy and more constant as the day progressed!

A few spikes did get driven, until the spiker broke (nothing major but it does need that bit to work, that parts now on order, but we’ll switch back to the other spikes tomorrow to get it happening)

A few more spikes were started, however the rain did put pay to that too. But at least the boys found another turtle, it’s that time of year when they’re out and about, we’ve seen quite a few of late.

So after a long morning tea, a call was made to the mechanical department to see if they had any indoor jobs for us and by sheer fluke, they needed some extra hands to assemble some pallet racking.

This is inside the new workshop at Castlemaine. After a bit of head scratching, we quickly worked out how they go together.

The workshop comes with its own scissor lift, which turned out very useful in assembling the racking.

We managed to string this job out into several hours of work, mainly to avoid having to go back out into the rain… Once completed however, we did call it a day.

Tomorrow, as the weather is potentially a little iffy, we will meet at Maldon at 8am, where we’ll plan our day according to the weather, there is a few options so we should be right to achieve something.

Lots more sleeper plates inserted today, around 0.5kms worth.

Of the plates inserted most have been tamped and all of those have been drilled. Spikes have been dropped out with a few started.

We’ll be continuing this on Thursday, when hopefully we’ll get all the remaining plates under, tamped up and drilled, leaving only the actual spike driving to go, which should be quite a straight forward exercise.

Thursday’s gang will meet at Maldon at 7.45am or out on site (near the gas pipeline) from around 8.15am.