We did a power of work today. However, only managed to remember to take this one very unexciting picture.

Today’s tasks included finishing off the new turntable road we built last week at Castlemaine,we continued to have no end of trouble getting things lined up nicely, however it works excellently one way and given its limited use for short term that’ll be quite adequate.

A weedspray of the yards and depots, plus any odd spots along the track that needed it, was undertaken. It’s reasonably good currently, with only the yards looking untidy.

A stop off at Muckleford was made to correct a few issues with Check Rails – nothing too major, but a few loose bolts were remedied to ensure everything stays within tolerance.

The afternoon was spent tackling signage at Donkey Farm Track, where one Railway Crossing sign was replaced for a much less faded version, while the bolts on the other defeated us so it’s now on the Truck for fixing up at Maldon for reinstatement later in the week.

We won’t have a formal workday tomorrow, as we’ll be spending the day up at Maldon organising our rather enormous chaos after all the recent Castlemaine works – however if anyone is wishing to join us, there will be plenty of odd little tasks to do.

Thursday will be a big preparation day, getting things ready for the big resleepering effort, which, given the poor weather this week, we’ll start on Monday 17th March.

Friday’s are now train running days, so we won’t be holding any formal workdays, anyone previously a Friday gang member would be extremely welcome on Monday or Wednesday as these will be new days that we currently don’t have a lot of volunteers rostered to work.

We’ll be out in force again on Tuesday.

To kick things off we’ll have the Maldon based people meeting at Maldon at 7.45am, to do a bit of car pooling so we can meet at Castlemaine at 8.15am.

The main flow of the day will be getting vehicles through to Maldon ahead of the resleepering campaign – hopefully kicking off on Wednesday!

Amongst other things, today was an odd jobs day, with a bit more foliage trimmed at Castlemaine, loaded onto the truck and train for disposal at more convenient locations.

We could go forever and we certainly haven’t managed to get everything, however a quick glance at the train should show just how little space we had left to add on any more.

We checked over a few turnouts and did some adjustments, ran a works train out to Maldon and back, testing all the level crossing on the way, which all worked correctly.

Tomorrow marks the start of Friday running, in lieu of Wednesday trains, giving us on the ground 4 clears days each week to knock over more work, without having to reduce the number of trains being run.

There won’t be a workday tomorrow, however we will be around Castlemaine Depot from 9.30am for anyone interested in attending – it’ll be a very varied mix of maintenance tasks.

We had a bit of a change of pace today, making up some new track rather than just fixing up old stuff.

It’s a run-off road for Castlemaine Turtable.

The logic of it is pretty clear from the pics, lining up with the 2nd set of roads that head into the loco shed.

As time and resources become available this can be extended back towards the ashpit, and when we get really wealthy we can consider getting back over the ashpit! However that’ll be a way off.

We spent a lot of time getting the levels close enough that we only did a minimum dig and didn’t need to do much lifting to achieve final height, as we don’t have much of a budget for this sort of work currently.

We did, however, need to keep the road access, so once the track was built and packed, we did drop in a few tipper loads of gravel.

We had to test it of course… the bit off the roadway will hold a Y class exactly – we could say we planned it, but it is a complete fluke!

We had a lot of trouble getting nice alignment with the turntable, we’ll have a bit more of a tweak on Thursday morning to see if we can improve it.

Thursday’s crew will meet at Castlemaine Depot from 8am, we’ve got a few odd jobs in the morning, then we’ll run a works train through to Maldon to clear the civil wagons out of Castlemaine Yard ahead of train running returning on Friday 7th.