Well big progress was made on Saturday.

Using steel sleepers with quick and easy pandrol fastenings, that we’ve had in our stores for years, just waiting for a use.

Using the new grab the sleepers were laid out, lined easily by hand, rails placed on top with pandrol lugs and fastenings installed.

This process proved to be extremely rapid and gave great results, with around 80 m of track knocked together in less than a day.

Below are some action shots of the day’s work.

Using the new grab on the excavator to lift the rails onto the sleepers – previously there would have been a lot of baring required.

All in all it was an excellent day’s work, keep an eye out here for details of further work days.

Today we put in our first timber replacement concrete sleeper, we’ve got others on the railway around Castlemaine but this was the first put into track as a timber replacement.

It is very much an experiment, to see if our axel loads and lower ballast profile can support them.

It was relatively easy to insert and install, so fingers crossed.

Today was spent getting ready for our next area of re-railing, the short straight on the UP side of Pipeline Xing.

Weather permitting we’ll be into this job on Thursday and Friday, any help is always greatly appreciated.

Our new grab has again proved it’s worth when it comes to putting on rail anchors.

The grab, when angled, can punch a hole under the rail through the ballast to make knocking on the anchors much easier.