What has been the best part of 12 months in the making is now complete! 4.2kms of continuous concrete sleepers between Maldon and Pipeline Crossing.
A few hundred metres of this were completed over the past few years, but the vast bulk of the job was this year.
It’s been a long and at times tedious job, however it’s a massive step towards getting us to a standard which we can realistically maintain. There’s still a long way to go, lots of ballast, tamping and drainage works to ensure years of a minimal maintenance Railway, but the bones are now in place to allow that to happen.
Thursday’s crew had the job of clipping up well in hand, with the final clips pulled on well before morning tea.
Once the clipping up was completed, it was onto the task of jacking and packing. It’s not a lot of fun, however the most amazing part of this process has been just how little jacking has been needed to achieve a relatively smooth top – something it most definitely didn’t have previously.
We continued the jacking and packing process right back along the straight as required. It’s likely we’ll continue to need to do this at regular intervals until we can acquire sufficient ballast and get a proper tamping pass over the length – however this is a small trade off by comparison to keeping the rotten timber sleeper sections in a safe condition.
The last job on Thursday was to remove the temporary 15mph speed restriction and return it to the now permant limit of 20mph for this section (once ballasted and tamped we’ll be in a position to raise it to 25mph in line with our maximum speed, however that’ll be some years away we expect).
A selection of pics, all at different locations along the same straight length, showing how much of a significant portion this straight has been in the overall Maldon to Pipeline Crossing project.
We’re pretty proud of our efforts here. It’s not perfect, but the heavy lifting is now behind us on the path to make it perfect.
Friday’s crew got the exciting job of bundling and strapping the timber sleepers, we actually had a pretty respectable recovery rate from the last little section we completed, the section down towards the tip crossing was very poor with an awful recovery rate.
A bit of a ballast shoulder (if you can call it that…) was pulled up right the way to Pipeline crossing, just to aid in holding it there in the heat, however, given the struggles we have trying to line it once it’s fully clipped up, we suspect this movement will be minimal – certainly no early signs – one advantage of short rail lengths.
Friday was a relatively early finish on site, which gave us time to tidy up and sort out some of our chaos at Maldon, including some grass cutting. Both trucks needed months’ worth of tools and consumables packing away and sorting. We barely recognise the back of the gang truck now! It turns out there was actually a floor under all that mess.
In unrelated matters, during the recent repainting works being undertaken around Maldon station, the platform lamps have been stripped back and repainted, that fresh shiny paint really makes these features ‘pop’.
It’s been a very busy year and we’re pretty much done now, we’ll have a small skeleton crew on hand on Tuesday to tend to a few small tasks but basically we’re in fix it mode now, trying to get on top of a few issue that have developed across the machinery fleet, ready to do it all again next year!
Hopefully, late next week, we’ll have had time to collate this year’s stat’s into a meaningful and highly riveting table to highlight just how much work we really did achieve this past 12 months!
Thankyou to everyone for all your contributions this year – it’s been one hell of a team effort!
VGR Civil Blog 