We’re tracking incredibly well with our fundraising. As of today, we’ve raised $70,590 out of our target of $250,000!

An amazing effort and thank you to everyone who has contributed.

As always, donations can be made securely at: https://www.vgr.com.au/donate

All donations over $2 are tax deductible.

In unrelated matters, we had a successful day today sorting out our rather impressive mess at Maldon – from the recent Castlemaine Works. As per Tuesday’s post, the resident photographer wasn’t on hand so therefore we forgot to take any interesting pictures.

Maldon Yard was a hive of activity today, with the carriage crew working hard away on two separate projects, an IA wagon and an M wagon. The steel body wagon is receiving some needle gunning down in the depot while the cattle wagon is being repaint and repairing up at the Goods Shed.

We had another volunteer beavering away on cleaning up the old Castlemaine Level Crossing Gate bollards – another exciting little project we’re hoping to show off soon!

These smaller projects are all in the spirit of lifting Maldon’s appearance, improving the experience for our visitors and volunteers and getting us back to showing off the now extremely unique features of a country branch line and showcasing the history of our railway. 

We did take one other picture… a reference pic for a new fan belt, which has seen much better days! It’s not very exciting, but it’s another thing we contend with on a fairly regular basis. We do undertake very regular maintenance on our equipment, which is one reason we’re able to keep this old gear performing without more issues – however it does all take time and effort and ahead of the big resleepering program, we will be undertaking some further maintenance over the next few days.

Tomorrow’s crew will meet at Maldon at 8am, for an action-packed day of depot activities.

We did a power of work today. However, only managed to remember to take this one very unexciting picture.

Today’s tasks included finishing off the new turntable road we built last week at Castlemaine,we continued to have no end of trouble getting things lined up nicely, however it works excellently one way and given its limited use for short term that’ll be quite adequate.

A weedspray of the yards and depots, plus any odd spots along the track that needed it, was undertaken. It’s reasonably good currently, with only the yards looking untidy.

A stop off at Muckleford was made to correct a few issues with Check Rails – nothing too major, but a few loose bolts were remedied to ensure everything stays within tolerance.

The afternoon was spent tackling signage at Donkey Farm Track, where one Railway Crossing sign was replaced for a much less faded version, while the bolts on the other defeated us so it’s now on the Truck for fixing up at Maldon for reinstatement later in the week.

We won’t have a formal workday tomorrow, as we’ll be spending the day up at Maldon organising our rather enormous chaos after all the recent Castlemaine works – however if anyone is wishing to join us, there will be plenty of odd little tasks to do.

Thursday will be a big preparation day, getting things ready for the big resleepering effort, which, given the poor weather this week, we’ll start on Monday 17th March.

Friday’s are now train running days, so we won’t be holding any formal workdays, anyone previously a Friday gang member would be extremely welcome on Monday or Wednesday as these will be new days that we currently don’t have a lot of volunteers rostered to work.

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.