We’ve had a fairly busy few days lately. We have been fortunate enough to access a large collection of track maintenance equipment from a retiring rail contractor.

This is quite a big investment for the VGR, one we’ve managed to finance using some extremely generous loans, allowing us to secure the items now and pay it back over a few years, however, as always any donations to help pay back the loans sooner would be greatly appreciated and help take the burden off the VGRs cashflow. Contact Will if you’d like to know more.

The items arrived as a great convoy on Monday, with a great mountain of things on various trucks.

Among the items are a Telehander, HiRail Tipper, 2 trolleys (to tow behind the Excavators), and an enormous array of hand and power tools as well as a small container to help store it all in.

We’ve already used the telehandler extensively in setting up our tool storage area in the depot at Maldon, the tipper still needs a roadworthy to complete the transfer, however is currently (and recently) rail certified, meaning once we get a bit of paperwork out of the way we’ll be able to make great use of this item.

The tools came as an excellent package deal and although we may not have a use for every last spanner or crowbar, the slight inconvenience of storing them while we work out what we will actually use, id far exceeded by the incredible items we’ve now got available to help us in our tasks.

We’ll no doubt be showing them off here as time goes by!

Tomorrow’s weather is looking interesting, however it should be okay late morning, so we’ll still plan on working, the plan is to drive dog spikes (using our new fancy spike driver!), meeting Maldon 7.45am or out at Gas Pipeline area from 8.30am – if it’s raining heavily we’ve got plenty of sorting in the containers at Maldon to do still.

Although today’s weather was predicted to be wet, it was actually a nice day. Even without a gang, a bit was achieved.

The signalling boys gave us one of their old cabinets, that wasn’t fit for reuse, to store some stuff in. After a few incarnations, we’ve settled upon it being a services box.

We’ve fitted it up with air and water. Despite the power box affixed to its side, we haven’t run power over, as we really don’t have much need for power here.

We can now wash the ice off the windscreens on a cold morning (hopefully being in the cabinet will stop the water supply from freezing too). The air supply is to pump up the truck tyres, which inevitably need doing on a regular basis. Hopefully this will make life just that bit easier. We might even fit an external tap so you can give you hands a quick rinse.

Installing all that used up most of the morning. Once the area has dried up a bit, some nice gravel spread down will finish it off.

The afternoon was dedicated to a full track and bridges inspection following the heavy rain yesterday. No issues at all were noted, with all the track drains working very well. Even the bridges, despite having fair flows of water, aren’t impacted by debris. The most impressive flow was at Winters Flat, but Muckleford Creek had a fair flow also.

Tuesday gang will meet at Maldon from 8am, were we’ve got a range of activities to do around the Yard there.

Tomorrow, although not looking as wet, is still looking wet and given the job we need to do requires lineside access, we’ll cancel the workday, to prevent any unnecessary bogging.

We should be back to finer weather next week, with a more normal workload planned. Tuesday we’ll be meeting at Maldon at 8am, probably doing odd jobs around Maldon all day.

Firstly, apologies for the late Tuesday blog and secondly, given the weather tomorrow is looking very very wet, there will be no workday. Friday may end being cancelled too, check back here tomorrow night.

Anyhow, Tuesday was successful, with just under 1km worth of sleepers drilled and spikes started.

A procession of drillers followed by spikers kept making their way along the track.

Works had to be halted momentarily as a Driver Experience train passed through the worksite, quite rare for a train to be running on a trackwork day, so a nice change for the gang.

The crew just kept on moving up the hill, with the progress very impressive.

Another short break in the works as the train returned through in the afternoon.

We’d all had enough of that by mid afternoon, so rounded out the afternoon by stacking a couple of pallets of sleeper plates.

Check back here on Friday for details of works next week.