Yesterday’s small gang spent the day dropping out spikes along all the plates that were inserted on Thursday, ready for drilling and spike standing on Tuesday.

Following that, sleeper plates were dropped out all the way to Sawmill Road on one leg, ready for insertion late next week. This process is happening much quicker than first expected, it’s certainly not an exciting part of the job, but setting up and getting into a system that keeps moving along is quite efficient.

We’re focussing on just one leg at a time, as with the other leg unplated, we can still see where the old holes are, making drilling new holes much easier. So far it seems to be working well.

It’s also now obvious just how far we have rerailed, as everything is now involving a lot of walking!

Tuesday’s gang will meet at Maldon at 8am or out near Gas Pipeline from 8.30am.

Today was a massive day of shoving in sleeper plates.

About 1.5kms worth of plates were inserted under the track, starting at tangent 11-12 and finishing up at curve 10, so far only in one leg. The big digger would lift, while the plates were slid under, the little digger followed along behind doing a tamping pass to firm everything up and prepare for driling.

It wasn’t without its slight challenges, with a broken off grab jaw slowing down proceedings for a few moments early in the day, but all spares were on hand to get us back in action.

The act of tamping behind the plate insertion not only helps prepare for drilling, by lifting any dropped sleepers, it also ensures the concrete sleepers are properly supported with ballast.

It doesn’t look greatly different following this step, however it has actually removed a few dips in the track.

Given that there was 10 of us on hand today, a small gang set about drilling holes and starting dog spikes, with quite a few hundred metres now ready to have spikes driven.

Tomorrow’s crew will be starting around the gas pipeline from 8.15am, dropping out dog spikes as required ready for Tuesday’s gang. And hopefully dropping out more plates, as we’ve inserted everything that was dropped out.

A rather unexciting day today dropping out sleeper plates, in readiness for Thursday’s gang to insert them.

However we had quite the deluge last night and below a few pictures showing the water flowing under a couple of our bridges, Muckleford Creek and Winters Flat.

It’s good to know the trackside drains all seem to be doing their jobs well, as no issues were encountered. Given how incredibly wet everything is now, we expect these creeks will flow for quite a few weeks.

Thursday’s gang will be meeting at Maldon at 7.45am or out near Curve 11 (gas pipeline area) from 8.15am.

Today marks the final rerailing works planned for 2022!

Yesterday gang installed the 94lb rail on the Down leg over Sawmill Road Bridge, while today’s gang completed the Up leg.

You’ll notice we’ve used long enough rails to span the bridge without joints, we set aside some 55m rails early on in the process for this purpose. At the UP end, or behind the camera, where the 55m rails end we’ve dropped back to 60lb before the level crossing, as we’ll need to rebuild the crossing as part of that work.

It’s now an incredibly different trip between Sawmill Road and Muckleford, well worth doing a trip on the train to notice what a difference it makes.

Although Sawmill Road crossing will be rerailed in 94lb, when it’s rebuilt, as soon as we’re on the up side of the crossing we’ll be dropping back to 80lb for the remainder through to Brown Street Ped. Crossing. So today really marked the end of the 94lb rerailing!

So… for some no doubt thrilling figures…

This week saw 427m of rail installed, taking us to 2552m of rail installed for August.

July was a slightly more impressive month, with 2949m of rail installed with the only other month being March which saw 550m of rail installed.

A total of 6,051m of 94lb rail has been installed into the track (or alternatively 3,025.5m of track was rerailed), which is an enormous achievement in such as short space of time! Everyone who’s been involved should be extremely proud.

Although we’ve now completed the rerailing, the job is far from over… we still need to return to Farmers Bridge and work through to Sawmill Rd inserting sleeper plates and spiking them up. We also need to replace all the failed timber sleepers with concrete and tidy all the jewellery and mess we’ve made along the way! Sounds easy if you say it fast, we expect this to take as long as the rerailing did, however we might find we get into a good rhythm and it goes quickly.

As the weather will be warming up around this time, it’ll be less than ideal to be doing rerailing works, so we’ll divert to other works until around Easter 2023 when we’ll finish the rerailing and remove the last of the 60lb in our mainline, we may do a little more this year around Winters Flat Bridge, depending on the weather.

Next Tuesday will be a change of pace, we’ll be meeting at Maldon 8am undertaking a range of odd jobs ahead of Thursday and Friday when we’ll be back out on the job installing sleeper plates.