This weeks Civil Saturday will be at Castlemaine signal box, tending to more maintenance as well venturing out into the yard to tidy up a few loose ends before the next round of track work there in a few weeks.

It’s forcast to be a bit chilly with possibly the odd shower so bring a jacket.

Meeting A box from 8.30am.

After another long day and lots of hard work, we’ve almost completed the turnout.

After dropping out all the jewellery it was into drilling and screwing.

Which before long saw us with two very straight rails, ideal for the straight leg of the turnout!

And in no time at all we’d dropped in the curved closure rails.

Carefully aligned to as per the turnout offset diagram (to within 1/2mm!).

Once the curved lead was fixed, the curved stock rails were moved into position with great precision thanks to the new grabs.

It would be no word of a lie to say these saved us in excess of 2 hours work over this project, just because of their incredible versatility and amazing controlability.

The final bolts of the day being done up. It’s fairly heavy work in turnouts, everything’s big, the equipment required is heavy and the heights are always awkward.

But when that’s the end result, it makes it all worth while.

It’s not quite finished, but there’s very little to go. Only the curved stock rail to fix down and point lever assembly/ spreader bars to install.

Next Monday to Thursday will be at Korumburra, helping out our friends at Coal Creek. As such there won’t be a workday on Thursday, but if all goes well we’ll be at Castlemaine on Friday to finish off this turnout.

Don’t forget Civil Saturdays is on tomorrow, at Castlemaine signal box. From 8.30am.

Today saw the start of construction of the first new turnouts in Castlemaine.

As the site hasn’t been surveyed, we used various methods to arrive at the location for the V crossing nose and simply worked off that. Lots of string lines, double checks and debating goes into these tasks (because we do so few we need to try and remember everything again!)

This turnout will split the loco road in two, one over the old ash pit and the other the re-aligned existing track.

The track seen here will be moved over to align with the centre of the right hand gate, running parallel to the ash pit. It was working back from here that we managed to established the location for the turnout.

We couldn’t quite get the turnout built in it’s final location, due to the current track being in the way, but it will only need very slight tweaking (about 400mm) to locate it once we’re ready to cut it in. Here Graham and Mick align the point timbers to the carefully placed string line.

We cheated a little… And actually set down two strings of old 60lb rail upon which all the markings for the timber spacings were placed, it also made tweaking much easier.

Apart from being rained on regularly, once we’d found our location, it was pretty plain sailing.

We’ve bolted up both the straight legs and the sleeper plates are under ready for drilling and screwing/spiking tomorrow.

We’ll be back here tomorrow and should have it more or less completed, hopefully. Meeting Maldon 8am or site from 8.30am

All 430 (is he) sleepers from yesterday had their pads installed before being placed to the side of the track.

They look very smart all sitting neatly beside the track.

We even inserted 1 concrete sleeper, testing out our new grabs… Extremely fast and easily.

We’ll do a bit of a feature on these later this week… (once we’ve mastered them!)