In what’s becoming a very well practised routine, we managed to insert a further 100 concrete sleepers into tangent 7-8, taking us almost to the brown street pedestrian crossing.

The day began near the pedestrian crossing, the tangent had been prepared earlier in the week, so the gang moved on to removing the fastenings from curve 7.

We even resurrected the gooseneck for the power packs to carry the spike puller. The word from the boys was simply… Why haven’t we been using it all along (the truth is we just forgot we made it).

A couple of fishplates were changed, to allow concrete sleepers to be installed.

Once curve 7 had had it’s fastenings removed, it was back to clipping up concrete.

The gang caught up to the digger inserting the sleepers, which obviously impressed Rolf!

Earlier in the week we dropped out the last of our stocks of these timber replacement concrete sleepers. Unfortunately we will be a few hundred short of getting all the way to Midland Hwy and it’s also why we haven’t used any up the Maldon end of the track.

We’re very hopeful that we can secure more of these sleepers to allow us to keep up the momentum on our current re-sleepering project.

However…. From tomorrow we’ve got a change of pace, the carriage shed extension has been brought forward so we need to get on in a hurry to get the necessary track work done. We’ll actually be starting out at Guildford around 8.45am tomorrow, before making our way into Castlemaine to begin the track work. Please feel free to join us.

Without the digger available (it’s almost fixed, thankfully not as serious as we suspected), it was a case of clip up everything we could. It’s rare to see both Will and Bruce this excited about clipping up sleepers!

We spent around 2 hours clipping up the first 50 sleepers, requiring the use of the porta power to spread the gauge to get the biscuits in, however the remaining 127 took less than 2 hours to clip up, only requiring the gauge to be adjusted twice! This is simply due to very slight differences in the gauge when this track was re-laid in 2002/3, it’s only a mm or two tight but concrete sleepers aren’t forgiving to any discrepancy.

The finished job gets us a long way towards finishing this project to Midland Hwy, really it’s only a few curves to go now.

As we’d finished our clipping up by lunch time, we looked at the ominous sky and decided we’d head into Castlemaine to check out the new loco shed. It’s big and looks impressive! It’ll no doubt feature a lot in coming months as we begin track construction.

The afternoon, despite the occasional strong hail downpour, was successful. We loaded our civil train with the concrete sleepers stacked by Woodlocks Ln.

The bigger machine is an enormous benefit when handling heavy sleepers, easily moving twice the number of sleepers the small digger will with far more than twice the stability with nowhere near the strain on the machine.

Around 300 low profile sleepers were loaded here, more of less clearing out the site.

It’s been wet… And wet means getting bogged. Thankful this digger is good at getting itself out of a bog! Something the takeuchi struggles with a little.

After getting back to Maldon, the hail returned!

Tomorrow’s workday has been called off on account of predicted rain and lack of preparation due to the digger being off line. But next week is looking like great weather and will be action packed, so please join in the fun if you’re at a loose end.

The good news is that we managed to insert a further 157 sleepers in tangent 7-8 earlier this week. We also got most of tangent 8-9 tamped up… Before we broke the digger.

Unfortunately a seal in the main swivel coupling (the bit that let’s the top and bottom slew around) has failed, rendering the digger largely inoperable.

After a fun day in the pouring rain of limping it off the track (just lucky it was parked on level ground close to a roadway!) we managed to get it floated back to Maldon and into the workshop undercover for Bazz to fix.

The afternoon wasn’t wasted, as we had to start the Y class to pull wagons out of the shed, we decided it was well overdue a battery charge so we did a run to Muckleford to bring back the civil train ready for loading more conc. sleepers near Woodlocks Ln, which will do with the Hyundai while the takeuchi is fixed.

The takeuchi is likely to out for some time, so check the workdays on the blog as we might divert onto some different work for a while.

Tomorrow will be clipping up the sleepers in tangent 7-8 as long as the weather allows! It’s forecast to be an okay morning so it may be a half day. Meeting Maldon 8am or near Rifle Range Bridge from 8.30am – bring your raincoat.

Nothing too exciting today, but we did manage to complete the clipping up of tangent 8-9, approximately 50 sleepers.

We even managed to replace the 20 failed wood sleepers in this section, with some of the better timber pulled out for the concrete sleepers. All in all an excellent effort for a small gang of 4.

Next week will be another big one, with another 180 odd concretes hopefully to be inserted under the track. Check out the blog works diary for details of workdays.