Another successful day today, with 17 timber sleepers replaced and 52 more concretes installed.

We’ve even dropped out the next 70 odd ready for insertion hopefully next week.

We’re really on the home straight for this project now, with only this short section left to get us through to Midland Hwy. It’s been a massive effort but certainly a very worthwhile one, with the real benefits going to become apparent when it’s time to re-rail.

Another successful day today, with all the concrete sleepers inserted yesterday clipped up by lunchtime.

It’s a nice peaceful activity, the problem becomes distractions from all the funny stories Mick tells!

After lunch, we managed to blow a hose on the tamper (thankfully on the very last squeeze of the job), so instead of moving onto the next section, while we waited for the replacement hose, we tested a few other methods of ballast spreading.

The V cut sleeper worked quite well… until it fell apart about 100m down the track. We’re always keen to find quicker and easier ways to do things. The real issue we’ve got is removing the rock from around the fastenings, we’ve got a few ideas, but need to find enough spare time to try them out.

However the usual bucket method ended up winning the day again, leaving a very respectable result.

After tidying up, we travelled the length marking and removing the fastenings of the failed timber sleepers, only about 10 along here which we’ll deal with first thing tomorrow.

Tomorrow we’ll be meeting on site here (Winters Flat Bridge) from 8am.

A fairly successful day today, with 140 concrete sleepers inserted under the track, completing the program up to Winters Flat Bridge.

Tomorrow and Friday will be here clipping up these sleepers and hopefully making a start over the other side of the bridge. Meeting near Winters Flat Bridge from 8.15am.

Today saw us successful complete the sorting of the enormous pile of fastenings in Castlemaine yard. Overall we did very well, getting close to the figure of items we were given access to. We fell short by a a couple of thousand pandrol clips, however 16000 is still a pretty good number! (another 4000 sleepers at least)

Once we’d tidied up the V/Line site, our attention was turned to the new track in the Carriage Shed.

It required a significant lift and level, but the end result is quite pleasing. We’ll probably need to revisit this in due course once it’s had a bit of traffic over it.

We simply squeezed the gravel into the voids of the steel sleepers with the grabs rather than with the tamping head, time will tell if this ends up with a better result but we are very confident this method has done an excellent job of filling the voids with gravel, which is half of the battle with steel sleepers.

A rough scrape of the gravel has left it better than before for shunting of trains, we’ll still add more gravel in due course but for now it’ll work perfectly for storing rolling stock.

The rest of this week will be concrete sleepering near Winters Flat Bridge, meeting on site around 8.30am.