Another good amount of rail was dropped out today. Another fullload of 80lb and a full load of 94lb.

With the 80lb we’ve almost reached Sawmill Rd, while with the 94lb coming from Muckleford we’ve almost reached the up end of Curve 11 (the long sweeping curve).

It’s starting to look quite impressive.

Tomorrow we’ll finish off the last of the rail cutting, sledding and hopefully jewellery collection. Meeting the Junction from 8.15am.

Well it’s getting close to being a done deal, as far as getting the rail onto our railway anyway.

We’ve managed to sled as far as we physically could, which is about 110m shy of the end of for track.

The afternoon was spent bundling and collecting up the jewellery between the end of the sledding and Moscript St.

Interestingly there was a small memorial made from fastenings to mark the end (almost the end anyway) of the rail recovery part of the job. We can’t claim credit for this work (artist unknown), but it did seem fitting that Mick and Will got a snap of this quite clever piece of work before the jewellery was loaded up and taken away.

The end is near, however going by the sleeper condition the end was very near anyway as the rail was really only holding onto the sleepers by rust and rock against the rails.

A few sleepers have been lifted, only thousands more to go now! Unfortunately, the vast majority are basically the quality of the kindling that can be seen on the left, this makes the job quite time consuming but it is what it is.

Tomorrow we’ll run another rail train or two to start clearing the great backlog of rail that’s amassing around the junction. We’ll also have a small crew collecting jewellery down towards Moscript St. if we have enough numbers. Meeting around the junction at 8am or between the junction and Moscript street thereafter.

A small gang of 4 today, but given all the preparations done by the past few gangs, we have just about set a record for the amount of track sledded in one day.

Approximately 700m of rail has been sledded and dragged up towards the junction.

Getting us to just short of the Lawrence St. Bridge. This is a very big step towards the end of the project, with only about 300m of rail still to be sledded.

Tomorrow we’ll be back here, hopefully sledding another 100m before we run into all the stockpiled rail. We’ll then turn our attention to collecting all the jewellery and getting rails ready for cutting on Thursday. (well do the final sledding then).

Meeting Maldon Junction from 8.15am.

Another successful day, all the loose rail near the junction was broken into it’s lengths and stacked beside our track ready for carting away.

We have even sledded and dragged up to the junction another 300m of rail, from Moscript St.

We are hoping to sled on Monday and Tuesday next week, which should hopefully see the rail lifting part of the job done. With a bit of luck by the end of the next fortnight, we’ll have most of the jewellery stockpiled and a good number of the sleepers out of the roadbed too.

There’s still a chance we might be all done be Xmas, so if you’re feeling like an extra day on the gang sounds alright, you’d be more than welcome.

Meeting between Moscript St and the Junction from 8am on Monday.