A glorious spring day saw us make excellent progress on Curve 21.

By 8.30 we were well into it, with the spikes pulled and digger busily inserting concretes.

To install these big concretes without disturbing the underlying roadbed, a 5 inch lift of the rails was undertaken, meaning the new sleepers sit where the old timber did.

This lift is run just ahead of the insertions, with the jacks removed and cascaded once we’d got one sleeper installed past the jack, we found that gave us a very even top.

Before long they were all under, with clipping up well under way. Just in time to finish the curve we’ve got quite proficient at this!

Out of the several hundred sleepers installed in the curve… we managed to install 1 the wrong way! And no they don’t have a correct way, but these gauge convertibles are not symmetric, so we chose a direction and stuck to it, not just for aesthetics but to improve ballast profiles and regulation. So once everything else had been clipped up, we went back and turned it around, quite easy when there’s no ballast there.

All the reusable timber sleepers have been bundled, strapped and moved to storage also, which was no small job in itself.

Mainly just to remove any gunk we’d introduced and to help level a spot for a ballast shoulder to sit on, rather than just tumbling down the embankment, we scraped the remaining shoulder material aside (what little was left).

Then we brought in the big guns to dump the first load of ballast. Starting right back at the start of the curve, we’ve dumped and ploughed, with Daylesford’s plough, 4 wagons worth, with at least another 2 still needed in the morning.

Just the usual sort of thing, but with a slightly larger drop than we did the other day.

If you look closely you can see where the ballast ran out, still a good few metres to go. We’ll save the ballasted track pics for tomorrow, but a little hint of how it looks is below.

The freshly bundled up sleepers were loaded onto the well wagons, which came along for the ride, except for the actual drop, where we left them up near Bendigo Road to help simulate a track fault to enable the ‘disable lights during a track fault’ feature of the new flashing lights.

It was an extremely successful day, far outstripping our first expectations, with 113 concrete sleepers installed, all the good timber bundled (approx 150 sleepers), a load of ballast dropped out and a myriad of tidying jobs completed plus a general line of the curve pre ballasting.

Tomorrow will be just as action packed and exciting, so if you’re a regional Victorian who is looking for something to do post lockdown, feel free to come along, plant your deck chair (or even better offer a hand) and watch us do our thing getting this curve jacked and tamped ready for trains on Saturday. Meeting Maldon 8am or on site from 8.15am.

Well today saw us give up our plans of using the concrete. Instead we resurrected the DERM and went back to dropping out timber sleepers by hand 

And pigs can fly….

The top photo, as well as those below are from the last ‘major’ resleepeeing this curve had back in 1995, interestingly on the 2nd of September, so close to 26 years exactly. A mix of grey box and red gum looking at the wagon and that’s certainly what we saw on the ground pulling them out today.

Alan Williams took these shots back then and has kindly forwarded them on so we can make a comparison.

Almost all manual labour. A keen eye will note in the very first photo a sleeper extractor / inserter at work behind the DERM, but even still the new timber had to be manually placed where the machine could grab it, which was no small effort!

The one well wagon has become three (one on loan from Steamrail), timber is being phased out for concrete and the days of doing things largely with blood, sweat and tears are very much behind us. It’s amazing to look back and appreciate just how many functions the excavator now performs.

Just as a note re life span of these timber sleepers in our climate, the grey box are weathered and probably about 3/4 of their new size, but still usable (we’ll cascade them into Maldon and Muckleford Yards), the red gum is fully life expired, generally coming out in lumps.

There has been a few spot replacements since the big effort in 95, but the bulk of timber was still from back then.

Now back to the present and today saw us working through the exact section photographed in 1995.

To add to the versatility of the excavator, the intermediate timber sleepers left in to hold gauge, are removed completely with the excavator. A simple tap on each end to drop and loosen the spikes, the grabs pulls out two spikes, the sleeper is skidded to one side and has it’s plates pulled away, ready to be flung aside and the new sleeper installed, saving a power of manual labour or even logistical headache getting the hydraulic puller back in the right place.

135 concrete sleepers was today’s count, with only 112 needed to get around to Woodlocks Ln, so all being well that’ll happen on Thursday. The dips and wiggles look bad, but the truth is they’re actually very easy to correct. All the dips are really just areas of deficient ballast and when some is added, a controlled squeeze from the tamper lifts the slacks out. Any wiggles can be removed with a shove from the Hyundai, however the ground is a little wet still to get trackside everywhere, so we may have to live with a few of them for a few weeks, but we’ll get them out.

These three pics, also from Alan, are from the 3rd of September 1995, showing the first train over the recently re-sleepered track, we’ll replicate this (sort of) on Friday, with the first train being the ballast discharge train.

The upgrade to big rail and concrete have changed the look of our Railway, it’s no longer a country branch line. Which can be seen as good or bad, but from an ongoing maintenance, manpower and economic concern it’s really the only way we can survive. This is very evident if you look at the tourist railways in the UK, they made these changes years ago for the same reasons and now things have weathered back they really don’t look so different from a 1950/60s railway.

Thursday will be the next workday, with lots to do to finish the curve and tidy up. Meeting Maldon 8am or on site from 8.15am.

It was a glorious day for a ballast drop.

We started by Winters Flat Bridge and have dropped a light skim over everything to Pyrenees Hwy.

Unfortunately because all hands were busy controlling wagons, only one shot of the actual ballasting in progress.

But plenty of after shots! We did do larger drops in the sections that need more lifting than others, hence the larger shoulder profile, which we’ll bring back in to use as final ballast after a good lift and tamp.

The ballast dropping is quite a fast process, the train moves along at Walking Pace, to allow controlled discharge from the wagons, while Daylesford’s plough, coupled on behind spreads the rock very evenly and forms an excellent shoulder of ballast at the sleeper ends.

Our aim with this section of track, which has quite a good ballast profile already is to do a drop like this, followed by a 2 to 3 inch general lift (ideally using a production tamper), which means the lower spots will come up more like 6 inches to form a smooth top and hence will require more ballast. We’re hoping there is sufficient ballast on the ground for that process with this drop, but no doubt there will be some places we’ll need to drop a little more following the tamping pass.

In the afternoon we decided we just hadn’t had enough of the ballasting fun so we dragged the rake up to Maldon and had it loaded up again, from the small stockpile we have there. This rock is destined for Curve 21 and we’ll be dropping it out on Friday Morning, so we need to get as many sleepers replaced between now and then!

We made use of the move to transport another 130ish full profile concrete sleepers up to curve 21 so we can get on and complete that job, hopefully this week.

A very productive Monday and hopefully we can follow that up with a productive Tuesday. We’re hoping to get another 100 or so concrete sleepers installed into Curve 21. Meeting Maldon 8am or at Curve 21 from 8.15am.

Another very successful day today, with 103 concrete sleepers inserted into Curve 21. It’s a little hard to tell, but we started at the whistle post in the distance and finished right where the truck is parked, certainly more than half the curve is completed now.

It was done in the same style as per previous, however this time we left about 1 in 4 timber spiked up to help with gauge and line, then the usual jacking of the track so the big concrete sleepers sat at the same height as the old timber sleepers, with the rails now sitting several inches higher. We did loose the line of the curve a little, but that was easily returned with a push or two from the digger.

Hopefully on Monday we’ll get a train load of ballast over this and we can then work through and get a nice smooth top to the curve.

Tomorrow is looking wet wet wet, so there won’t be a workday, however we should have something on Monday and Tuesday next week.