Today was a very tidy up and order the place kinda of day, with trimming of grass around the station, a bit more weedspray and various other odd jobs like burning a bonfire and standing some bollards.

Thursday will be a bit of a social day, to help celebrate all our achievements in 2022, we’ll still be doing a bit of work around Maldon in the morning (from 8am) then we’ll run a special train to actually go out and experience all the trackwork we’ve done.

Today saw us run the last of our ballast trains for a while, primarily as we’re now out of ballast.

The main drop was on a section near Maldon which had little to no real ballast on it.

We also spent quite a bit of effort trying to get the last of the rock out of the wagons, which proved to be quite a challenge as it has set a little like concrete in the corners, but we’ve done fair well and hopefully as it dries out the last of it will fall.

It’s quite a good looking little train all told, and yes we are aware we forgot to put the tail disc up, although we spent as much time going backwards as forwards so we would’ve been wrong either way.

Tuesday we’ll be spending the day at Maldon attacking various tasks, we need to get on top of some vegetation there, it’s not too bad, but a tidy up is still needed. Meeting there from 8.30am.

We set aside today to get a head start on what is likely to be one of our grassiest years.

We focused on Bridges and Blackberries. Where possible before applying some herbicide, we’ve flail mowed the Blackberries. We had great success with this method last time, with many of our harder blackberry infestations now well dead.

The other reason for focusing around the bridges is to reduce the chance of damage from fire, as we’re sure you can appreciate, wooden bridges and fires don’t go well together, even small fires can lead to big damage. Where appropriate we’ve cut the grass before spraying.

All the bridges and crossings around Castlemaine were treated.

In between quiet moments of spraying, the flail mower has made a serious dent on the mowing task, still plenty to go but certainly far less onerous than it was before.

There will likely still be a second cut in most areas, however the spray we’ve applied to the weeds should mean we’re not trying to battle quite as thicker foliage in the next cut.

There’s still plenty of off track stuff to do, however today proved the ground is actually still very soft! So another week or two before we can tackle everything.

Tomorrow’s crew will jump back to ballast trains, we’ll meet at Maldon at 8am or out at Muckleford from 8.30am.

Today was all about ballast trains and there was a lot of them!

We began by dropping 3 wagons out on Curve 16.

This was followed by lots of loading before heading out to Sawmill Rd, where we made a light discharge, as required all the way from there to Curve 11, another 5 wagons worth.

Curve 11 itself saw another 5 wagons discharged, it was quite light on for ballast, as there’s probably a bit more settlement in that location due to an old bridge.

While back at Muckleford, we had the flail mower running around tidying up the yard, we also used the opportunity of a loco on site to pull everything out of 3 road to give it a good mow either side.

This is one of the only ballast trains we’ve run were we actually included some gang transport, generally we just all pile in the loco but that gets a bit squeezy. The ZD van set the train off nicely and towing it behind Daylesford’s plough did actually improve the ploughs performance some what, it seemed to have the effect of adding weight and prevented the plough lifting like it sometimes can.

It’s all looking very tidy after a good trim.

The final drop of the day, another 5 wagons, was out around Curve 18 through to the down end of Curve 20.

We’ve focused on areas, such as this, that had little to no real ballast, especially areas that need some rock available to tamp up and fix a few dips.

By day’s end, our enormous pile has been reduced to this, just enough to do Walmer Road Crossing and top up Walmer Road Bridge as needed. We’ve still got 2 wagons to discharge on Friday as well as trying to get some caught ballast out of all the wagons, hopefully with some mechanical aid we’ll get them clean.

Check back tomorrow for details of Thursday’s gang, we did much better today than expected, so the plans have changed a little.