We’ve now completed tangent 10-11, with the remaining 5 lengths installed today.

Only a small crew of 4 today, so an excellent effort.

We’ve now got the bolting up down to a fine art, using the digger to perfectly align the rails and ensure everything goes together by hand.

Only one joint required triming to work in with the concrete sleepers, so that saved some time. We had the 5 lengths in and clipped up just on lunch time, a total of 205m of rerailing.

We had to juggle a bit of rail to get a neat closure unfortunately, which is only about the 2nd time in the past two months we’ve had to do so, just luck more than anything regarding where the joints fall, as although they’re nominally unit lengths, in reality it’s not quite the case.

The afternoon was spent removing screws and anchors from the high leg of Curve 10, we’re well over half way through that, so if we get a few people tomorrow and the weather holds out, we might even get a decent bit of rerailing completed.

Tomorrow we’ll meet on site from 8.15am, it’s now easiest to come in from Sawmill Road and under the bridge.

A bit more progress on tangent 10-11 was made today, with the UP leg now completed and just into the curve. Leaving only 5 lengths to be installed into the Down leg on Thursday.

The afternoon was spent preparing as much as possible to speed things up on Thursday and Friday.

On Thursday we’ll meet at Maldon at 7.45am or on Site from 8.15am. We should comfortably complete the straight and once that’s behind us, we’ll jump back to the UP leg and begin working around the curve.

Only another 80m of rerailing in tangent 10-11 today, but a good amount of preparation for next week was also achieved.

We also cut in the closure rails for both legs and fastened them up.

And most importantly we undertook some precision trolley straightening, using the delicate tool that is the excavator. From time to time we do bend things accidentally, thankfully we’re quite adept at unbending them.

We’ve pulled the remainder of the spikes in the UP leg which will save us some time next week.

By day’s end the remaining section of the tangent seems quite manageable and hopefully by mid next week that’ll be done so we can focus of getting Curve 10 underway.

On Tuesday we’ll be meeting at Maldon at 8am or out on site from 8.30am.

Another very successful day, with 490m of rail installed (245m in each leg) into Tangent 10-11. We’re about 2/3 of the way along this straight now.

We had done some preparation here on Tuesday, however screws and clips still had to come off.

Interestingly this length, although no record breaker, did turn out to be quite a comfortable length to walk, as the truck and smoko weren’t too far away, which they end up being when we do a longer length on only one leg.

The Down leg was tackled first, all done and clipped up by 11, with the up leg then keeping us busy through until knock off time.

We have actually also managed a bit of preparation for tomorrow, with another length just needing the screws and spikes removed to install. We’re yet to cut in both closure rails, however we thought we’d see how we go for numbers as if there’s a few of us, we might tackle another few lengths as well.

Meeting on site 8.15am, come in from either Muckleford station or Sawmill Rd.