Another excellent day’s work, with around 65 sleepers inserted and the majority of those fully spiked up.

We were short on hands today, and will be for some time now that our assistants from the local prison are in lockdown amid the current health concerns.

However we took a very systematic approach to the work based on gang size and in this case, slow and steady has really won the race. The unspiking team worked through the job with digger behind removing the sleepers.

We then moved back to the start of the job, working together to install the new sleepers, sleeper plates, drilling one end and stand the spikes.

It was a very good system which proved very efficient, it’s not very different to usual but we did find it better to work as a group, prevented a lot of walking back for stray tools.

We all discussed the current corona virus issues, measured out our seating arrangenents to maintain at least 1.5m between us. The gang has unanimously decided it is willing to continue in it’s current style as we all feel it is a low risk environment.

Tomorrow will be more of the same, with hopefully another 30ish sleepers installed. Meeting Maldon 8am or curve 20 from 8.15am.

Friday ended up being a very successful day, with an additional 42 sleepers inserted as well as giving all 90 installed Thurs/Fri a tamp up.

These grabs have sped the process up greatly and the manual labour is reduced to really just drilling and driving the spike hammer.

The 70 marked on the sleeper is exactly number replaced in curve 19. Often we find extras along the way to do, but this time it was bang on!

We even found some time Friday to start the boxing up.

But given the amount to be done, it was better to tackle the job for a few hours this morning without the gang hanging around looking for jobs.

The track looks really quite snazzy with a bit of a scrape up. There was little to no shoulder of ballast along here, so we’re now making use of what little rock is out there.

The little ledges created during these scrapes will also help hold future ballast, which we’ll start dropping out as soon as this re-sleepering cycle gets through to Maldon.

A lot of work was also put into the drainage through this cutting, it was somewhere between blocked and non-existent! But it should flow very freely now. With the drain now lower than sleeper level we shouldn’t experience issues with mud holes (not that we did here really).

Just a quick word about carona-virus and the gangs, at this stage we still be running the usual gangs for those that wish to attend.

However we do understand completely that you may wish to isolate during this time and encourage anyone wishing to do so.

Depending on future annoucments re-corona-virus this may change, so please check back here before each planned workday.

Tomorrow’s workday (Tuesday 17th) will not be running, due to other commitments, however we’ll be back Thursday as per usual with more sleepers to go in.

Really just more of the same this week, but we’re getting very systemic at it now… That is until we broke the digger again.

Track-side Assist was called in to replace the one tiny ruptured hydraulic hose hidden within the depths of the rotating head, minor fault but totally crippling. We lost a few hours to this unfortunately, but that’s just how it goes sometimes.

We were able to keep pulling spikes to help fill in the time however.

We’re working in curve 17, with the replacements generally few and far between, meaning we quickly cover a lot of ground, which was obvious when it came time to walk all the way back to smoko.

We were back on line by late morning, racing through the sleeper replacements thereafter.

We managed to insert 50 replacement timbers today, which all considered is excellent. They’re all drilled with spikes started on one side.

If we are able to get some extra hands tomorrow, there’s no reason we couldn’t race through the rest of this curve.

Meeting at Maldon 8am or site from 8.15am.

Today’s works train was about collecting all the remaining bundled timber sleepers from the Castlemaine section and transferring them to their homes along the Maldon Section.

Considering we can logistically only fit about 4 packs on a truck, a train is a very sensible way to move the 30 packs that needed moving.

We’ve still got about 200 sleepers yet to bundled up which weren’t collected, however will need all these and probably more to get through to Maldon.

The afternoon was spent marking those needing replacement and then distributing them alongside ready for more replacements next week.

We’ll be out near pipeline crossing on Tuesday, continuing onwards towards Maldon. Meeting 8am at Maldon.