We’ll be out in force again on Tuesday.

To kick things off we’ll have the Maldon based people meeting at Maldon at 7.45am, to do a bit of car pooling so we can meet at Castlemaine at 8.15am.

The main flow of the day will be getting vehicles through to Maldon ahead of the resleepering campaign – hopefully kicking off on Wednesday!

Amongst other things, today was an odd jobs day, with a bit more foliage trimmed at Castlemaine, loaded onto the truck and train for disposal at more convenient locations.

We could go forever and we certainly haven’t managed to get everything, however a quick glance at the train should show just how little space we had left to add on any more.

We checked over a few turnouts and did some adjustments, ran a works train out to Maldon and back, testing all the level crossing on the way, which all worked correctly.

Tomorrow marks the start of Friday running, in lieu of Wednesday trains, giving us on the ground 4 clears days each week to knock over more work, without having to reduce the number of trains being run.

There won’t be a workday tomorrow, however we will be around Castlemaine Depot from 9.30am for anyone interested in attending – it’ll be a very varied mix of maintenance tasks.

We had a bit of a change of pace today, making up some new track rather than just fixing up old stuff.

It’s a run-off road for Castlemaine Turtable.

The logic of it is pretty clear from the pics, lining up with the 2nd set of roads that head into the loco shed.

As time and resources become available this can be extended back towards the ashpit, and when we get really wealthy we can consider getting back over the ashpit! However that’ll be a way off.

We spent a lot of time getting the levels close enough that we only did a minimum dig and didn’t need to do much lifting to achieve final height, as we don’t have much of a budget for this sort of work currently.

We did, however, need to keep the road access, so once the track was built and packed, we did drop in a few tipper loads of gravel.

We had to test it of course… the bit off the roadway will hold a Y class exactly – we could say we planned it, but it is a complete fluke!

We had a lot of trouble getting nice alignment with the turntable, we’ll have a bit more of a tweak on Thursday morning to see if we can improve it.

Thursday’s crew will meet at Castlemaine Depot from 8am, we’ve got a few odd jobs in the morning, then we’ll run a works train through to Maldon to clear the civil wagons out of Castlemaine Yard ahead of train running returning on Friday 7th.

We’ve had a big week, but it has been very successful.

We’ve replaced 138 timber sleepers with concretes, 18 point timbers, removed a small mountain’s worth of foliage, removed a good number of small top defects and given the area a pretty in depth tidy up.

This morning began with a good amount of tamping, correcting a few tips and minor faults, nothing major, but it certainly makes everything look much nicer.

A general tidy up and clean around all the important mechanical components was a big focus of the day.

Once the tamping was completed, it was onto boxing up and ballast tidying.

It’s come up looking very tidy.

A lot of manual work was undertaken on the turnouts to make them look much more presentable and, more importantly, make inspection of the fastenings and timbers much easier.

Quite a bit of additional foliage removal was undertaken. This will hopefully mean we don’t have any major hassles here for a good few years now, it was becoming very overgrown.

As we inadvertently could have altered all points, signals and locking at this end of the yard, a full check and some minor adjustments were made to ensure everything was working correctly.

A keen eye might also note that a spectical has again been fitted to the outer home signal – the coloured glass bit.

We’re getting towards our overall goal of getting 100% concrete sleepers into this section, only about 150 timber sleepers remain now, right out to Rowe Street, a few more Vline shutdowns, and we’ll be there.

By the end of today, the Vline contractors were making excellent headway, getting the track back in place up at their worksite, they plan on having the job completed tomorrow. VLine have ensured that any timber sleepers in our track that required lifting for these works have gone back as concrete, which helps us out greatly, it’s not a massive number but it’s certainly not insignificant.

It’s been a busy week, had the weather been kinder we would have been able to install a further 50 or so concrete sleepers, however all considered we’ve done very well and we’ve certainly made good use of the opportunity getting the shrubbery back under control.

We’ve handed the site back to Vline, there’s only a few days left of the occupation with test trains running on Wednesday and normal trains back on Thursday.

Next week will see us sort out our now rather massive mess that’s spread far and wide around Castlemaine Yard. Tuesday’s crew will meet at Castlemaine Depot from 8am.