Another successful day on the re-railing gang, with 27 80lb rails in place and partly spiked.

We started off with very nice mild and overcast weather, perfect for trackwork, it turned to a fairly sunny day but still comfortable. Here the gang unloads all the gear off the trucks.

In no time the unfastening was well under way, a slightly cantankerous rattle gun gave the screw removers a little trouble but they pushed through and got there.

We even got to try out our new gizmo today, it’s a sleeper drill (which featured briefly months ago) which was missing a nose cone to direct the drill into the sleeper plate hole. Bazz finally managed to find time, in between all the other hundreds of jobs we lump him with, to manufacture one! It works very well, much quicker and easier, but a few small tweaks will no doubt occur over time.

You can see the whole gang was eager to check it out!

This section is abundant with steel sleepers and we’ve discovered it’s much easier to fasten them before the timber as it not only sets gauge but it allows more flexibility with installing the lugs, as Will is doing here.

Rolf’s primary task today, closely supervised here by Bruce and Clive, was marking the hole locations for the dogspikes. An important job as there is often up to two previous sets of holes in most sleepers so it’s important to ensure the new spikes go into solid wood.

By close of play all 27 rails we installed, spiked 1 in 3 and tamped. Tomorrow’s crew should easily knock over all the spiking and will most likely try to get in at least 3 more rails, this will reduce the workload for the last section.

Any extra hands always welcome, the more hands the more we can achieve, so please join us at Maldon at 8am or site from 8.30am.

This week is all about re-railing. Today was spent cleaning up the remaining jewellery from last week and dropping out the new jewellery.

Here the ballast has been scraped aside to allow for the rail to moved into position.

Sleeper plates, fish plates, bolts and steel sleeper fastening were dropped out. Here John’s placing one sleeper plate at the end of every sleeper.

A view of all the rail in place ready for tomorrow’s crew to bolt up.

The remaining section of re-railing on the Down leg of tangent 15-16 was tackled today and successfully completed!

Things didn’t start well… Some fairly localised rain decided to start just as we got to the site and continued right through till about 9am, so naturally we spent quite some time admiring the interior of which ever vehicle we managed to scramble into.

But before long and lots of eyes over the weather radar we decided to brave the rain and hope for a clearing. As we’d already removed some of the fastenings previously, the job of removing the old rail only took about an hour.

The first few 80lb rails in place.

By lunch we had all the new rail in place, all 15 lengths of 80lb and were well into dogging. Strangely we seemed to make very similar progress to days with the larger gangs despite only having 6 of us. Read into that what you will…. But we decided it must’ve been down to all the preparation on Tuesday.

The final rail being cut to size. We chose to make use of two smaller rails for our closure here rather than cropping a long one.

Mick and Clive working back up the hill finishing off the drilling and spiking.

By days end we’d managed to complete all spiking, clipping and tamping of the new rails. An effort we were all proud of. All that’s left is to collect all the old jewellery.

We’ll be out again tomorrow, this time preparing rails for the other leg at Muckleford. Any extra hands are very welcome as numbers are a little low at the moment. Meeting Maldon 8am or Muckleford from 8.30am.

Following on from yesterday’s extremely successful efforts, our small gang of 5 was tasked with the job of completing the remaining drilling & spiking of the 33 rails installed.

We were very fortunate with the weather, starting off around 4 degrees C making the morning the ideal time to knock over all the drilling and spiking. As we were still setup from the day before, we were well under way with the spiking by 8.30am. As we’d had time the day before to pack (tamp) all the sleepers, the drilling process was very rapid, not having to worry about lifting sleepers.

John and Trevor are well into it here. drilling holes and standing dog spikes ready for the spike driver to begin it’s job.

Neville and Trevor hard at work on the spiking hammer, nearing the end of the job, somewhat unplanned was that we ended up having to work up hill for the last few lenghts – this reminded us why we normally make such a point of aways starting at the top!

With spiking complete, attention was turned to the collection of all the removed jewellery, 33 lengths of 80 lb (almost 500m) is quite a length to walk, especially as the hot sun was now teaming down, but thankfully far from the hardest job on the gang.

A quick scrape of the rock to help fill in the tamping voids and preapre the sleepers to take the rails for the other leg saw the job completed! We’ll likely need some more ballast on this section as time goes by, however we’ll wait until all the 80lb rails and in and then assess it, it’s also much easier to do the work without mountains of rock getting in the way.

Next week, weather depending (looking like some well needed rain may fall early in the week), will see lots of the lineside mowing taking place around Castlemaine. Tuesday will be a mix of mowing and preparing the remaining rails in tangent 15-16 for Thursday when we hope to complete this leg down to Donkey Farm Track. Friday will hopefully be a catch up day, finishing off and cutting more lineside grass.