Today was spent dropping out material and preparing for resleepering around Rowe St.

By days end we’d dropped out a couple of hundred sleepers and begun the task of inserting them, only about 10 so far however, but we’ll do more later this week.

Thursday morning meeting Maldon 8am or Rowe St. from 8.30am.

The week began by installing a few more concrete sleepers at what will become the approach blocks for Bendigo Rd. Some joint shifting was undertaken too to prevent conflicts with the flashing light circuits.

While technically not essential, it’ll make the next part of the work far easier, quicker and will overall be less work.

Today’s task was a bit of a trial, a very successful one too.

Curve 21 (the curve between Bendigo Rd and Woodlock’s Ln) is the only section of the track not to have received attention in the past 5 years.

The sleepers spacings in the curve are all over the place, which makes standard replacements a nightmare. So we decided we’d trial re-sleepering 100% with full profile concrete.

We went through and unfastened every 2nd timber sleeper (more if the spacings were wrong), followed by jacking the track to a suitable height (now nice and light due to few sleepers) and inserting ever second Concrete Sleepers without having to dig down and disturb the roadbed too much. Once done and clipped up, the rest of the old timber was replaced with concrete.

The method worked a treat and as the initial jacking was kept relatively uniform, only minor jacking was required once all the sleepers had been installed to achieve a good top.

By not completely releasing the track, the line of the curve wasn’t lost and very very little effort was required to gauge the rails for clipping up in the concretes (as the timber was still holding it).

It’s received a good tamp and a sprinkle of ballast. We’ll run a few train loads of rock out once we’ve done a bit more.

It’s come up a treat, although only 47 sleepers today, out of about 500 in the curve, have been installed, it was a very good test day and was comfortable without being rushed. If we had two clear days, we could easily expect to triple that number no worries.

Next week, Tuesday will see a start made at Rowe St. Crossing. We’ll be running a train load of sleepers out there ready for the rebuild and will hopefully begin installing a few. Meeting Maldon 8am or Rowe St. Crossing from around 9.30am.

Today was largely dedicated to removing some serious settlement of track around Maldon Yard. 1, 2 and the turntable road all received a lot of attention, with almost every joint lifted and a significant amount of plain track brought back up to correct height also.

Maldon yard is almost exclusively made up of fouled ballast these days, so it holds water and inevitably settles every winter, hopefully our very thorough effort this time will buy us a few years, when we can look at seriously fixing the situation.

Anyone familiar with the loco road at Maldon would know it’s always been uneven and quite rough, well it’s still both of those things, but now only slightly so. Some sections were lifted up to two inches (50mm), which has made a significant difference.

We found ourselves with a bit of spare time at the end of the day, so set about installing concrete sleepers under the outer insulated joint location for the upcoming Bendigo Road Flashing Lights.

As prefabricated 7ish metre modern glued insulated joints will be cut in and welded in place here, it’ll save a lot of effort if all that needs to occur is the current rail be unclipped and the new clipped back up, better than wasting time drilling more holes into these now fairly old timber sleepers.

We’ve only installed 7 so far, another couple to go and a few steel sleepers need to come out, so that’ll be Tuesday’s job, we also need to juggle some rail here to enable the welding in of the insulated joints, so hopefully that’ll get done Tuesday too.

Meeting Tuesday 8am at Maldon or on the up side of Bendigo Rd from 8.15am.

Well today has taken us to pretty well job done at Bendigo Road Crossing.

The recent rain, although small compared with other parts of the country, has certainly soaked the ground.

Today’s tasks involved installing the two remaining junction rails and replacing any failed sleepers. Here we’re removing the spikes.

The new rails, of course didn’t match up with existing joints, so we chose to cut the existing rail rather than the nice long ones.

Last time we used the little digger for this job, which worked, but the big one made extremely light work of it.

The old rail was out in no time.

A good scrape away of the rock and with the pandrol adaptor’s installed, the new rail was about to go in.

Once the new rail was in place, we knew exactly where to cut and drill the existing rail.

The pandrol adaptor’s have the added advantage that once installed, the gauge is correct and held, so the digger can travel along very safely without worrying about any fastening up while trying to feed the new rail in.

By lunch we’d managed to get both rails in, with no real hassles or headaches.

We spent some time correcting the line of the track on the immediate down side of the crossing, which makes it look significantly better.

After lunch 11 failed timber sleepers were replaced with concrete, which we’re now quite practised in doing, so it also went like clock work.

The remainder of the day was spent jacking and packing the approaches to give a very smart looking length of track. We could still tweak the line a little, but unless we start running at 80km/h it’s a bit academic.

Tomorrow we’ll be correcting some track faults around Maldon Yard, meeting there from 8am.