Well today was our first attempt at a rail train…. It’s not going to go down in history as our greatest success, but we’re confident we’ll have an efficient system very shortly, but fundamentally it did work and we’re going to be able to get all these rails to where they’re needed without too much hassle.

Using both diggers, the rails were placed beside the track ready for lifting up.

And the lifting on, using the diggers in tandem, it worked okay but a third digger would help even more for this method, we have another method in mind however, more on that next week.

A keen eye will note we’ve drafted in a 4 wheeled wagon (HZL wheel transport wagon) to help us move the 55m lengths, ideal length train for our needs.

It took us about 2 hours to load the 18 94lb rails, greatly slowed by the number of joints. We are hoping we can greatly speed up that process with the remaining rail, as we’re fairly joint free from here on in thankfully.

Beside loading a train, a lot more rail was cut and dragged up ready for loading, we’re making good headway now.

All this is now ready for loading and dropping out next week!

Our grass cutting contractors have also been busy and wow what a difference it makes! There’s still a bit to go, and a second cut in places is likely, but overall it’s now quite presentable.

Next Tuesday will be more rail cutting at Maldon Junction from 8.15am.

After another very busy day of preparing rails for loading, we’ve now got rail everywhere!

It’s all over the place and with any luck we’ll run a train tomorrow to run the first load away to it’s new home.

We also managed to know over a small bolt replacement job in our track beside V/Line which has been on the to do list for a while, thanks go to V/Line for assisting in getting us on site during their shutdown.

We’ll be back into rail cutting and dragging tomorrow, meeting at Maldon Junction from 8.15am.

Today we began moving rails onto VGR land, with approximately 30 brought over onto our track ready for loading onto trains.

For various reasons, we have elected to not attempt to use 82m rails in our track, rather we’ve drawn the limit at 55m, with all rails longer being docked in half. Given our lines very very narrow ballast shoulder (due to narrow embankments) we expect we may have issues maintaining lateral stability of the longer rails in the hotter weather – the donor line has very large ballast shoulders and even on it movement is evident. Our available train length also runs out at 55m so a happy coincidence.

In the pic above, Will is using a hired band saw to cut the rail, normally we use abrasive rail saws but given the high fire danger and location of cutting, we decided we’d try the band saw for a week to reduce the fire risk and see if they’re any good – and we had to finish early today because of heavy rain…..

So far so good, it’s probably fractionally quicker than a circular saw and completely spark free but a lot heavier.

Tomorrow will be more of the same, meeting from near Maldon Junction from 8.15am, we hoping to get a few train loads prepared so the more the merrier.

Today with played pick up the hot bits of metal. We managed to loosen, load and stockpile around 1kms worth of fastenings between Stephen St – Fryers Rd and a bit beyond.Not a fun job by any stretch of the imagination and certainly less exciting in the hotter weather, but the gang did an amazing job given that except for the digger running them to the stockpile it’s all manual labour. It’s now 1km less to do next time!The rest of this week and the start of next will be preparing rails for loading onto trains. We’ve got a rough idea of how we’ll manage the logistics, but like everything so far, it’ll be a learning curve. Meeting around Maldon Jcn tomorrow from 8.30am.