It was a day of odd jobs along the railway, involving removing kinks and dips. The first was a significant kink in our otherwise very nice curve 16. The worst was between the two rocks sitting on the rail seen above.

Under Mick’s careful eye the kink was removed, greatly improving the curve.

Most of the day was correcting dips and odd track geometry at the most obvious locations along the line (based on ride quality). The hardest part of all this work is often working out when to stop…. we could easily spend the next 2 years doing nothing but jacking and packing! But that alone isn’t going to ensure we maintain a strong and safe track.

The hardest part of this job is lugging around the jacks, which seem to become very heavy by the end of the day.

It’s the time of year where at smoko we are constantly on the search for good shade – it can be harder than it sounds at times. Today’s culinary delight for Mel included home-cooked pasty with chutney, eaten in tandem with a Banana. An interesting choice and one which certainly gave us something to discuss.

Once lunch had finally run it’s course, the next job was installing a few metal biscuits on some of the concrete sleepers installed in tangent 12-13. We haven’t been installing outer biscuits on the straights generally, however a small patch (probably a poor batch when installed back in 2002-2003) of timber sleepers were starting to show a lack of gauge holding ability.

So to sturdy things up and ensure we maintain gauge until we can re-rail and re-sleeper this section, we have installed our trusty metal biscuits into the concrete sleepers, which are still proving to be a complete success.

We rounded out the day with a bit more tamping, fixing issues around mud holes, rabbit warrens and settling near Winters Flat Bridge. It was a very successful day, tending to lots of little jobs.

Tomorrow will be an action packed day of works trains, with various things requiring moving around the railway for upcoming works. We’ll be leaving Maldon around 8.30 – 9am and you’re most welcome to join us, we hope to be back around early afternoon but it just depends how much fun we have!

Despite the high tech system of concrete sleeper installation we now employ, sometimes we just can’t help driving a dogspike by hand!

We were actually replacing any failed timber sleepers that weren’t part of the 1 in 3 replacements. Only 11 of these in this section, with the concrete cycle managing to elimate the majority of the life expired timber.

We did however also manage an additional 30 concretes today, which takes us just over the crest of this hill, a good effort in this awkward cutting (they’re all bad but this one always seems awkward to work in)

It started to again resemble a railway once we’d scraped up the ballast.

There was some pre-existing poor geometry towards the crossing, which was jacked and tamped as part of the works.

Despite needing a drop of ballast, the job came up looking quite smart.

Once this has all settled and we’ve managed to drop out some rock we’ll probably need to return to lift out a few drips and hopefully straighten a few wiggles.

It’s still a big improvement over before!

Another 50ish (forgot to count) sleepers installed into tangent 8-9 today.

We even used the opportunity to start some ‘on track’ excavator training of one of our regulars, he started slow with the tamping head and by lunch time had a very good grasp of the beast.

The short section between Sawmill Rd and the bridge was tackled first.

Then working up the hill towards Castlemaine.

Screw and spike pulling kept the front gang busy, while the mechanical help got enough sleepers under to allow the gang to return and clip up.

Not a bad effort in the rather slow and awkward condtions of the cutting and around the roadway.

Tomorrow will see us out of the cutting, with tamping and some additional lifting required to correct some less than ideal geometry in the afternoon. Meeting Maldon 8am or site from 8.30am.

Another 59 concrete sleepers installed today, along with a tamp and ballast scrape it’s looking very snazzy.

After the last sleeper was in, the ballast was scraped up ready for tamping.

It all went very well until the tamper blew a hose. But not to worry, the hydraulic supplies in Castlemaine sorted us out nice and quickly with a new one.

The job looks quite impressive.

Despite all this the gang also removed the dog spikes past sawmill road ready for next week, only the screws to go now.

Next week will be back here, aiming at around a similar number or possibly a few more weather depending.