The day began with the exciting job of collecting the jewellery, left over from yesterday’s re-railing.

Once all this was sorted and packed away, we had to clear the track for a special train. Not something that occurs very often as we usual insist on no trains during our workdays, however we made a special exception.

Anchors were installed next, before a change of location.

The afternoon was spent at tangent 10-11, distributing concrete sleepers in readiness for next week’s big effort to install 223 concrete sleepers. Moving all the sleepers into place is a big enough job on its own, however we still needed to dodge that special train a few more times which, while a very pleasant thing, did break the work flow a little.

We’ll have gangs running on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday next week, so heaps of opportunity to join in the fun.

An extremelly successful day today, with a further 20 80lb rails installed into tangent 20-21.

Unloading the spiking hammer from the truck in the wonderful morning sun.

And what a glorious morning it was, not cold, sun shining and the feeling of early spring in the air. Unfortunately the wind picked up a bit later on, but it was still very pleasant.

Once all the gear was loaded onto its appropriate trolley and we’d managed to marshall the trolleys and excavator in the right order, we were into it.

We even cheated a little more this time, the digger remained on the track all day, carefully ensuring the rail was placed into the correct location before moving along to slew in the next length in. This actually sped things up a little as all 20 rails were in and bolted up by morning tea.

With Rolf handling the mighty rail saw in style, the closure too was cut and bolted up before morning tea, a very good achievement.

All the sleeper plates were inserted first today, often we do them in batches with the gauging and drilling, but this actually seemed to work well for the gang today.

The clipping of the steel sleepers followed this process, being much like concrete sleepers in the way gauge is fairly absolute, so it’s much easier to set them, rather than need to tweak things once the timber’s all spiked up.

Bruce hard at it on the spiking hammer, with the tamper hot on his heels.

By afternoon smoko, almost all holes were drilled, spikes stood with only driving left to go. Even Will jumped down from the digger to lend a hand (only right near the end though…).

An excellent days work.

We only have a very short supply of 80lb rail left now. We’ll use this up within the next month.

However it won’t quite be enough to see us out of this straight (the whole section between Maldon and Muckleford in fact) which is a little frustrating as the section it needs to join up to will be very much within sight! We have lots of very short rails, which we may be forced to used, which isn’t desirable.

However, we are still hopeful that VicTrack will come good with their offer of rail from the now closed Castlemaine – Maryborough line (a lot of which is 80lb). We hope it coincides nicely with us using up all our current Rail ex Bandiana.

Tomorrow will be a big tidy up from today, breaking up more 60lb rail to recover bolts and hopefully distributing concrete sleepers if time allows.

This morning was spent preparing for re-railing on Thursday, with half the dog screws removed, awkward spikes removed at joints and the very last of the jewellery dropped out.

The afternoon however was spent replacing loose bolts between Muckleford and Rifle Range Bridge.

With many of them tightened only twelve months ago, many bolts are now so old they’re starting to become stripped and fatigued.

So we’ve adopted a policy of replacing all loose old bolts with newer (recovered from re-railing works) high tensile bolts with cone lock nuts.

This should greatly reduce the ongoing bolt tightening required.

The gang will be out in force re-railing at tangent 20-21 this week.

The day started with a concrete sleeper drop out to tangent 10-11.

We’re very thankful our trusty digger can comfortably lift and stack these concrete sleepers, as the thought of manually handling 230kg doesn’t appeal!

We managed to stack 144 concrete’s track side here this morning, as that’s all we could fit onto our 5 wagon train once all our other bits and pieces were loaded up.

Our other bits and pieces were two complete turnouts! Two 94lb turnouts for the upcoming trackwork about to occur at Castlemaine. One of these will be used to connect up 5 siding to make it usable, while the other will be to divide the turntable road into two tracks (the existing one and one across the old ash pit).

We managed to unload our turnouts and sleepers well before lunch so we headed back to Muckleford to load up another 80 concretes, as that’s all we needed to finish off the drop off at tangent 10-11.

This went very well until it was time to take the digger home…

And the wet weather made itself known as the digger was well and truly bogged. And after ten minutes of trying we decided it’s removal from the bog is a Monday job!