We’re back on our own railway for a few weeks. After a big truck and excavator shuffle yesterday, today saw the start of work.

We’re working our way through a sleeper cycle from Muckleford to Maldon, replacing anything that is life expired. We’re using the best of the timber released from the Castlemaine section as part of the concrete sleepering program.

We started out fairly slowly today, changing the grabs over onto the Takeuchi and only having a very small group, however we still achieved a lot. We’re replaced 5 sleepers in tangent 13-14, another 7 in Curve 14a and we’re most of the way through 45 in curves 14b&c (the wiggles on the down side of Muckleford Creek Bridge). None have been spiked up yet, but we’ve got to leave something for Thursday’s Gang.

We’ll be out in force again tomorrow, with a later start time of around midday on site (we’ve got a few commitments first up) then again Thursday and Friday at the usual time.

Another big day of rail towing. We’ve got about half of the loose rail over Goudges Ln towards Donkey Gully Road.

It’s been a big months worth of work, a big thank you to everyone that’s been involved. We’re having a break from this job for 3 weeks to get back onto some others.

Next week we’ll be back on our Railway, replacing sleepers in the Maldon to Muckleford section.

A big day, with an enormous amount achieved.

We completed the lifting and dragging of rail up to Godfrey Lane (about 550m).

While the Hyundai was out of action, we tested the takeuchi at sled dragging, with it doing about 480m of the 550m. An excellent effort but it certainly is much better in the hands of the more powerful machine.

We mixed up the method a little, with some pre-removal of 3 out of 4 bolts which helped speed things up.

By Lunch Bazz had worked his magic on the Hyundai and it was alive and kicking once again (it was a cooked solenoid!), thanks Bazz!

We used the big digger to pull the last few lengths of rail up. The gang is really getting the pattern of works down pat and with incredible efficiency. A true credit to their dedication.

They even played lollipop men… For the whole 1 car all day.

We had so many people today that we even started sorting the jewellery into rough piles for collection.

A quick video showing some more dragging, not really exciting but it shows how much friction a rail has when being dragged.

Dragging the 2nd last rail of the day over the sled.

Thankfully the sled helps guide the rail very well, however we do always stop before dragging the free end over, clearing everyone and everything out of it’s reach before sliding it across.

It’s incredible how much flick a rail can have when wandering free like this.

The end spot for today’s lifting. We’re certainly making excellent progress.

The late afternoon was spent up by the next crossing, towing rail through to Donkey Gully Road. This will be the bulk of tomorrow’s work too. It’s quite tedious and very time consuming, but it’s the only way to get it all to Castlemaine, so we’ll just keep plodding.

Tomorrow’s meeting place is Goudges Ln around 8.15am. (or leaving Maldon around 7.30ish).

Another big day of rail dragging. We’ve moved all but 5 lengths of rail across Godfrey Lane up Goudges Lane.

We got very efficient at using both digger in tandem to move rail quite fast. That was until we had an electric issue arise in the Hyundai… Hopefully we’ll have it back for tomorrow, but if not we’ll soldier on with the Takeucki.

We’re very fortunate to now how 2 diggers at our disposal, previously if we had a break down we generally had to stop work, but that isn’t such an issue these days.

We’ll be out in force again tomorrow, lifting more rail. Meeting Godfrey Lane around 8.15am or Maldon at 7.45am.