Amongst other things, today saw us remove a mud hole near Bendigo Road Crossing. It’d been forming there for years, but this wet winter was certainly making it get worse.

So we removed all the sleepers for a good distance either side of the mud spot and dug everything out.

And of course if you’re going to that much effort, why not replace the sleepers while you’re there.

We kept to a manageable working face and dug down until we found a solid base, interestingly the mud and clay was very much confined to the areas that were visible from above, it wasn’t overly saturated or badly contaminated.

A total length of 23 sleepers were dug out and installed.

Tomorrow’s job will be dropping some ballast, jacking and tamping. We have done exactly this type of treatment previously and found it to be very successful, given our light train weights and relatively few trains, it’s unlikely once a good few inches of ballast are under the sleepers that we’d break through the clay layer below.

Meeting Maldon tomorrow at 8am.

Today saw us knock off a few small jobs around Maldon Yard.

The first being the replacement of 2 turnout timbers, a nice easy job to set the pace.

We then replaced 20 failed timber sleepers in 1 road, although forgot to get a photo!

A considerable amount of time was spend correcting geometry faults at the UP end of 1 road, simply due to settlement. The curve onto the turnout had just started to cant the wrong way and the whole thing had settled an inch or so, a symptom of the ground being well and truly sodden given the rainfall so far this season, its been around 5 years since this bit of track was built so it’s not unexpected for it to settle in that time.

By day’s end we’d tidied up all the mess and given the ballast a scrape, leaving it looking quite cared for.

Thursday is likely to be more work near Maldon, provided the weather holds out! Whatever the weather does, we’ll be meeting at Maldon at 8am on Thursday.

Given we had a few silted drains and the promise of more rains, it was an opportune day to ensure they could flow freely. The main issues were around Brown Street in Castlemaine.

And a few hundred metres away was the real cause, a silted up catch drain that was diverting a large quantity of water towards the pedestrian crossing. That’s now been dug out and directed to flow through a culvert, just hidden by the digger bucket.

Next week’s weather is looking interesting, so check back on Monday for details of workdays.

On what we’d planned on being a day of installing additional anchors, the rain had other ideas. We did manage to get the curve nearest Maldon completed, this is a job well plug away at on and off for some time until we reach Muckleford.

Once the rain got the better of us, we headed to Castlemaine, were we refitted some now inflated tyres to the excavator.

Before drying out in the loco shed spreading some ballast along A road.

This whole siding still needs a considerable lift and tamp, we’ll save that for another raining day, however it’s now nicely rocked up and ready to go.

Given we’ve got a few volunteers away for Friday, it’ll be used as a lineside drain clearing day, given the forcasted rain over the next week. This is largely just digger work, so no formal planned workday.