More fishplates today, in the heat. Each of these sessions gets us closer to Donkey Farm Trk.

Certainly a job well done and no small effort in this weather!

As you may have read on the VGRs social media last week, we were victim of another theft, more track materials and this time also a break in to the Muckleford Station Building whereby 2 Train Staff Ticket Boxes were stolen. A total replacement cost of $200,000 for the track items stolen in recent times is not unrealistic, as many of the items just aren’t made anymore, or if they are, they’re very expensive. We’ll hopefully find some items through other avenues, but for now, we’ve still got enough to keep us going, but it will have an impact in a few years’ time.

We made a decision on Friday to remove all our easily stolen items from Muckleford and bring them up to Maldon behind lock and key, a wagon load and 2 truck loads were brought up and that has pretty much cleaned out Muckleford. It’ll take us a while to sort all of this into a logical system but we’ll get there.

Thursday’s gang won’t be running however Friday’s will be, meeting at Maldon at 8am

We had an extremely successful day today, with our new turnout almost complete.

We began the day by finishing off the headshunt, dropping out the rest of the rails, bolting it all together and clipping it up.

This was all done the easy way, squeezing everything up with the grabs and only using the handtools when needed – certainly saved some time, this doesn’t work accurately enough for out on the running line, but for a siding, what we’ve done will be adequate for at least 100 years.

We tried something a little different this time, before installing the curved rails, we ballasted what we could from the tipper and the rest using the digger.

This was a massive improvement, as we didn’t have to spend hours shovelling rock around the complex trackwork, just a few scrapes with the bucket, a quick blow and we were in business.

Like the turnout before, the ground below had been installed with a fall to aid drainage, as such the straight leg required a very small lift only, while the other leg did need some jacking. The laser level proved its value once again!

Before long it was into cutting rail ready to install the closures. We got very lucky with the cool weather today for rail cutting, however a good dampen down before and after the cuts was still a good idea.

Before long it was into the fine tweaking of the curve to ensure it was consistent and smooth, it most clearly wasn’t at the time of this photo, however it turned out very nicely.

The usual processing of drilling, spiking and installing the matching rail followed, all with what seemed like a minimum of fuss.

A bit of final ballasting certainly saw the job nicely in hand.

We’re rather proud of our efforts for this week, we’ve still got a bit to go tomorrow, spreader bars, point lever etc etc however it’s likely we’ll knock them over.

We do however have a small excursion to Muckleford planned tomorrow morning, however we’ll still meet at Maldon at 8am, then off to Muckleford by 8.30am, all being well we’ll be back to Maldon by morning tea to continue with our works.

It didn’t take us too long today to get the straight lengths of the new turnout installed.

We’ve fastened everything up, right to the toe of the points, however we’re yet to fit and spreader bars etc… so for the time being the temporary end of usable track is much as it was previously.

This turnout has been built to a much lesser standard than our usual jobs, mainly due to its main use being only on the straight and we’re also scratching for sleeper plates and pandrol clips for turnouts now, so we’ve done the best we could with what we had available. We’ll beef us the fastenings on the curve when we get to that part.

It’s all starting to come back together now.

Thursday’s crew, should have much better weather. Meeting at Maldon from 8am

We had a successful day today, with the temporary headshunt removed, timbers dropped out and rails roughly positioned.

All going well tomorrow, we’ll get the straight leg fixed down, however that may be a little optimistic with the weather predicted.

Meeting at Maldon from 8am.