We had a very successful day today, inserting and clipping up 107 additional concrete sleepers in Curve 16. This take us to just outside the cutting – which we’re extremely happy about, this isn’t by any stretch the worst cutting, however they are always extremely awkward places to work in.
As yet, it hasn’t received its final tweaking, however its looking amazingly good already. Another 50 or so have been prepared ready to be tackled this week, with tomorrow’s crew set to start that out on site from 8.30am (meeting Maldon 8am).
We had quite an exciting day today, with the arrival of a Ballast Regulator, all the way from our friends at Steamramger in South Australia.
This move has been sitting in the wings for about 3 years, waiting for the stars to align at either end to keep the transport and crane costs to a minimum!
The lift was extremely straight forward and before we knew it, it was down on VGR metals.
It’s not gone for many many years apparently, however after a good check over of all the fluids, the fitting of a battery and the turn of the key, it started like it was last used yesterday!
Because it started, we’ve moved it into the headshunt to keep it safe and sound for now, we had intended running it off the turntable, however the clearance against the platform is too tight without turning it first so we’ll worry about all that down the track, for now it’s out of the way.
We didn’t try every single bell and whistle on it, however it would appear that everything does work and it even came with spare wheels as these are very close to the end of their service life.
Before we can place this into service we’ll need to go over it with a fine tooth comb, give it a full service, work on setting up our accreditation system to ensure we can safely manage this new device and get some formal instruction and training on its use so we can train up our people going forward.
Given how good the overall condition is, it would be great to give it a coat of paint to tidy it up.
Given we’ve got very little ballast it’s not going to be an everyday item, however the ballast broom will be extremely useful in tidying up the track and when the day comes that we do get ballast, it’ll be a massive bonus!
Tomorrow’s crew will be back onto resleepering, meeting at Maldon 8am or on site from 8.30am.
More of the same today, however lots of pics to show off the hard work.
One of the hard pictures to get on the track gang is the synchronised bend and grab manoeuvre, captured here during the bend phase
We did need to upgrade diggers when picking up the plates, as the little digger just wasn’t up the task.
Some rail needed moving to fix up the joint locations. The joints from here on for several hundred metres shouldn’t require adjustment, meaning we should be able to achieve things a little more efficiently.
It was all systems go today, with the gang doing a great job of keeping up with the digger.
Some jacking and packing saw any major issues corrected, and it’s easily now better than it was previously.
A very big tidy up was had, bundling sleepers and stacking the rubbish timber clear of the drains.
A bit of a scrape to bring in the edges and clear the drains certainly made the job look much more finished.
It’s come up looking a treat and based on the very poor timbers that had we removed in kit form, this wasn’t before time.
Monday, we’ll be having a change of pace. There won’t be a formal workday as there’s several small things to tend to around Maldon Yard. Tuesday will be back to situation normal. Meeting Maldon 8am or on site from 8.30am.
Things are progressing well out on the resleepering works, with the first pass of the intermediate sleepers inserted and clipped up today, instead of having the gang watch the remainder being inserted we diverted to distributing more sleepers to allow works to progress.
Many hours were spent sorting, preparing and dropping out fastclip sleepers, in fact the whole stockpile in this pic has been distributed, allowing another good few hundred sleepers to be installed over the coming weeks.
Tomorrow’s crew will meet at Maldon at 8am or out on site from 8.30am to continue with the preparations and distribution – it’s never a fun job but a necessary evil in the process.
Often requested has been a progress map of our work on the track, it becomes a very complex task as there is many facets to our works and where does one draw the line as to current works and previous efforts. As part of our record keeping process we do plot our works on a map and we’ve attempted to make that a little more available and accessible – it’s a very large PDF which will require zooming in to see, however hopefully it’ll be of some value – it may be best viewed on a computer.
We’ll endeavour to update this monthly while the major works are occurring.
VGR Civil Blog 