Another big day today, with about 1km of rail unspiked and dragged (only a very short way) towards Castlemaine.

We began from just off the Midland Hwy Bridge.

With the crew soon having that length ready for dragging.

Thankfully the digger does the heavy lifting here, giving the spike pullers a bit of a break.

Now that were into the poorer quality sleepers, spike pulling is much easier, with most pulled by hand and the lifters only getting the stubborn ones.

Our little digger is up to the job of towing the rail, but it’s not fast. Next week we’ll be calling in our bigger Hyundai digger to speed things up and reduce the workload.

About half of the rail removed has been towed to the first crossing, with a the rest to make that journey tomorrow.

It looks very different without rails!

We’ve now got a very good system, which will be greatly improved with added towing power.

By close of play we’d made it into the next curve, a massive effort. The much cooler conditions helped significantly.

Hopefully we can maintain a similar pace to this. We’ve still got a long way to go and lots of tidying up to do following rail removal, so please if you can spare a day, join us!

Tomorrow will be anchor removal, ready for more unspiking next week. Meeting near Vaughan Springs Rd. Yapeen around 8.15am (or leaving Maldon around 7am.

Well after many years of searching for more 80lb rail to complete the re-railing of our track, we’ve finally been allocated a section of unused track.

It is a mixture of 80 and 94lb rail, which is fine for us. The rail is generally in excellent condition.

Best of all it’s very close to home! It’s a section of the disused Maryborough to Castlemaine Railway. We’ve been allocated (through VicTrack) the section from Guildford to Maldon Junction.

The main advantage being we don’t need to do any trucking of the rail, therefore no need to cut it into short lengths.

If we’re honest, we’re a little sad to see this line going. But it is in extremely poor condition and certainly far below any standard should the line be re-opened, so the material is much better in use improving our track.

Today was day one of the recovery effort. It started out in a thick hazy of Bushfire smoke, thankfully not from anywhere nearby.

All our beasts (the machinery that is) have been called in for this big job.

The day started with the removal of anchors, with this point here being the start of our takings, just over the Midland Hwy Bridge.

The digger was used to scrape away the extremely built up ballast shoulders. This section here was re-laid about 20 years ago, when the new bridge was installed.

We managed to complete around 650m of de-anchoring today, an excellent effort for the horrid heat we were working in.

All anchors were collected into drums as we went, to remove the need to come back and sort. Plates and spikes will be collect via an electromagnet and trucked to our railway for later sorting as time allows.

This is a good representation of the general track condition, very poor.

Lunch today was a very welcome break, however shade is very hard to come by around the old Guildford Station. Poor Mal was the man on the blower, a very dirty job.

After lunch we tackled the first unspiking! It was hard work, as this section still has good sleepers (the only ones!), with the spikes still firmly held. We know it’ll get a lot easier from here.

A few stubborn bolts, but so far they’ve all undone.

Once unspiked across the bridge, the rails showed just how much they can move in the heat!

The first section of rail towed… It was long and probably the longest we’ll tow, around 85m.

We will be dragging these, in stages, all the way back to Maldon Junction to load onto a train for dropping on site.

So far we’ve only dragged the rails a few hundred metres, but tomorrow should see them dragged up to the first road crossing.

We’ll be out here for the rest of this week and all of next week, we hope to achieve a huge amount in this time, but we will need lots of help. Please feel free to join us any day. Contact ganger@vgr.com.au for details.

Another 22 sleepers installed today, mainly concrete but a few timber as well.

After a good tamp and ballast scrape this section is looking very smart.

Next week will be a big week, as we start 9km of rail recovery! Work starts Tuesday, with any extra hands very welcome. Meeting Maldon 8am.

Today saw a very old section of poor track corrected. This very short section between Maclise Street Crossing and the pedestrian crossing has been on our watch list for some years, finally showing signs in December that it was due for renewal.

As the location was noting short of awkward, we decided it best to do a total sleeper replacement rather than individual sleepers.

As it was largely buried, we were presently surprised to find that several of the sleepers were still really quite good, but while in there it would have been foolish not to replace them.

Given the location of the conduits for the track circuits, we elected to do all the replacements from within the 5 foot, an easy task when the gap is large enough. We even cleaned out all the ballast to make the job easier.

We haven’t as yet ballasted or tamped this section, a job for tomorrow.

The sleepers near the crossing took all morning, but we did manage to insert a further 9 concrete sleepers and 14 timber sleepers into the nearby curves, just as spot replacements for life expired timber.

We used a mixture of timber and concrete sleepers, it’s a bit of a test to see how the concrete performs given the somewhat poor quality of the ballast here.

Similar tests have so far proved extremely successful, we’re fortunate that given our light axle loads, low speeds and relatively few trains, we can get by with installing concrete in lesser quality ballast with no issues. The timber is second hand, removed from near Muckleford where we’ve installed concrete, it’s of varying quality and we’re not likely to see more than 4-5 years of service, which is why we’re eager to see how the concrete will perform.

We’ve got another 20 sleepers to install tomorrow (we’ve already removed the old ones). All will need a tamp and the usual boxing up of the ballast etc…

It has been declared a day of total fire ban tomorrow (mainly due to wind), we will still be working however as we have no grinding, cutting or high fire risk tasks to undertake, we will look at finishing early if the weather turns out to be too bad.

Meeting at Maldon 7.45am or site from 8.30am.