Tomorrow, originally planned to be at Muckleford Creek, will now be at Castlemaine Yard. Meeting Maldon 7.45 or Castlemaine from 8.15am.

We’re getting there, the end is now in sight. Today saw all the sleepers laid out, rails cut and drilled to length and a good start made on clipping up.

Given the fact this is a siding, we’ve used up a lot of short lengths of rail, which is a nice thing to do, but ends up being quite time consuming bolting them all together, cutting and drilling as required to turn it into a string of rail.

But by lunch time, it was all starting to look a bit more finished.

We’ve clipped up well over half of one leg. There’s about one days work left to finish that and another to ballast the track and lift it enough to make it usable. We still need to do some lining, but the basic idea is now very obvious.

Once we complete and ballast this, it’ll look very smart and more or less complete the works for this part of the yard.

Thursday (and probably Friday) we’ll be at Muckleford Creek Bridge replacing a beam which has decided it’s time to retire has arrived. Meeting Maldon 7.45am or Muckleford Creek Bridge from 8.15am.

Well we did it! The turnout is now connected and usable, so long as trains only wish to head towards the turntable.

Once the last of the closure rails had been installed and fastened down, any missing ballast was applied.

The majority of the afternoon was spent removing the spreader bars and turnout rodding to enable ballasting and tamping, once complete all that was re-instated and tested.

Unfortunately, a nearby turnout, whose rodding also had to be removed for the exercise, didn’t behave itself when re-assembled, so a good amount of adjustment and testing was required but it’s all fixed and fully usable.

The whole turnout has had a good tamp, but at this stage only a minimal lift to get it serviceable. Once 5 siding is connected, we’ll be able to apply a little more rock and get it to a perfect top and level.

With the piles of ballast and dirt now cleared, the turnout can be clearly seen from the carriage shed, it’s just that little bit between to go now and it’ll be usable.

We had hoped to get a bit more done on 5 siding, but as with any work in a yard, things never go quite to plan or happen as easily as they would out on the track, but we’re still very proud of our efforts.

We’ll be back here on Tuesday next week, hopefully to get the concrete sleepers laid out, rails bolted together on top and a get a start made on clipping up. Meeting Maldon 8am or Castlemaine from 8.30am.

Making the new turnout part of the track, rather than just a fancy standalone feature, was the focus of today.

Joining the new build up to the existing, required a good amount of pre-work discussion, but in no time the action plan was formed and we were into it.

First up some ballast preventing the job was moved, followed by laying out sleepers and rail.

We’ve been able to make use of a few 80 to 94lb junction rails that we’ve had lying around, a very nice way of joining different rail types.

Given the timber sleepers we re-used were in relatively good condition, but had been spiked in a few locations previously, we installed the rail using the recently featured pandrol adaptor’s.

The day might come when rails magically fit into a gap without cutting… But we’re not holding our breath.

Once the rails were cut to length, everything just fell into place and straight away it looked like it was meant to be.

Thankfully we had enough people to have two tasks on the go, one lot fastening up while the other started lifting and tamping the turnout.

It’s amazing just how much more finished the turnout looks with some rock on it. The background view here is the slewing of the existing turnout track to line up with the turnout, which it did very nicely. A little bit of tweaking required, but it’s pretty good.

By day’s end the closures had been cut and roughly installed to join the turntable road up once more.

Tomorrow’s crew should comfortably complete the join up and final tamp of the turnout, ready for traffic.

Meeting at Castlemaine from 8.30am.