All of the recently re-railed section, had spike holes drilled and spikes driven today, which was a lot of drilling, spiking and walking.
We started near Brown Street, working down hill to Winters Flat.
We had at least two drills on the go, sometimes three, the power pack unit, which proved very effective, and a couple of standard hand drills. It’s a lot of holes and in this not new timber it certainly saw us go through a few augers.
Following that was a parade of spike droppers, spike standers and spike starters.
This allowed the spike driver to have a clear run to chase along behind.
By day’s end every spike was in and driven home, with only a few failed timber now remaining to be changed tomorrow for concrete.
A final tamp to ensure everything is supporting the rail adequately will happen over the next week or so, which will allow us to remove the temporary speed restriction.
Tomorrow we’ll again be meeting at Brown St Ped Crossing, around 8.15am.
On what can only be described as one of the most exhilarating days we’ve had in a long time…. we spent the whole day distributing and then installing sleeper plates. Quite literally thousands of the things!
Without having to head back to the Muckleford stockpiles, we had exactly 3 plates left over from the various collections we had nearby, pretty good luck really.
All of the recently re-railed track now has sleeper plates, with a good portion of the first curve now drilled, with a few dog spikes stood ready for Thursday.
Meeting Maldon 7.45am or Brown Street Ped Crossing from 8.15am on Thursday.
27 failed timber sleepers were replaced with concrete today. There’s around that again to do in the section re-railed this week before we go through and fasten all the timber down.
This was the little digger’s first proper go on this re-railing job, with everything up to now being the domain of the big fella.
These replacements are having the effect of bringing the number of concrete sleepers up to better than an average of 1 in 3, with quite a few 1 in 2 concretes now in the track.
We’ve even put up the speed restriction boards, just visible right at the end of the bridge.
Lots of tamping took place this afternoon, with all the new sleepers packed, any significant dips corrected and any timber sleepers not supporting the rail squeezed up to offer some load bearing.
Next week we’ll be back here, replacing the remaining sleepers, installing sleeper plates and starting to fasten them down. Meeting on Tuesday, Maldon at 7.45am or from 8.30am near Brown St. Pedestrian Xing.
Today’s effort was again a great success, albeit somewhat chilly at the start with a light frost, reminding us its still winter.
As we hadn’t undertaken any preparation this side of the bridge, a lot of today was spent getting the old rail free. This is the worst part of the job unfortunately, but it’s just got to be done.
In no time though we’d reached the end of the curve, the rails has been swapped and clipping up was full steam ahead.
We’d initially planned to get to the end of the curve, to match where the 80lb ran out on the high leg, but we decided that given we’d achieved that well before lunch, we could probably manage another few lengths.
To give us a joint stagger between legs (these rails aren’t all exactly the same length, so trying to get them square would be a power of work, with no real gain) a 14m rail was installed, but that resulted in the next rail having a joint exactly in the pedestrian crossing! So, two 14m rails were installed, giving us the equivalent of the same desired stagger, without the nuisance of a joint in the crossing.
Here we’re bolting up the first length on the down leg past the curve, we’d re-railed the down leg of the curve some years back in 80lb to strengthen it, so it was nice to be able to bolt straight to it.
As we were feeling ambitious, we extended our re-railing to take us through the pedestrian crossing, which inevitably meant digging it out.
Thankfully a very quiet crossing, so we didn’t inconvenience too many people for the hour or so the crossing was open.
By day’s end we’d clipped up all the concrete sleepers and cut the closure rails into the 60lb, one was easy and one of fell exactly 2 inches on the wrong side of a 60lb joint, so a half length of 60lb was cut in to give a good closure.
Today saw a further 315m of rail installed, bringing the weekly total up to 1064m (we did a calculation on site from memory but we underestimated, so gang we did even better!). That’s a massive effort for only one week! Only many thousand metres to go now!
Tomorrow, we’ve got a good list of jobs to complete before we’re ready to allow trains over at the weekend, lots of sleepers need changing and a good amount of tamping is required. Meeting at the Brown St. Pedestrian Xing from 8.15am.
