Tuesday’s are often our preparation day, however we got such a good headstart on Friday, we were ready to actually make a start on the job today.

In addition to doing more preparation and a few odd jobs at Maldon this morning, we’ve installed 60 concrete sleepers today, taking the minimum additional insertions this week down to 160, so very achievable.

We’re yet to give it a final lift. However, we’ve tweaked it enough to run over very safely tomorrow. By some weird fluke, our really temporary ramp back to timber is one of the best we’ve ever made… and it will only last one day.

Thursday and Friday we’ll be back out here, getting over the rise and as far down the other side as we can, we’re determined to remove all the timber in this section before the end of the year.

The weather is looking potentially wet, however in our planned task of getting a head start on more concrete sleepers, we should be able to duck for cover if need be.

Meeting at Maldon 8am.

Friday…

It didn’t take too long to finish off our inspection on Friday morning.

We quickly decided to correct a few issues in 2 road, lifting a significant dip and replacing a cracked fishplate.

Our attention was then turned to a bit of a hole that had formed between 2 and 3 roads in Maldon Yard, we had hoped for a glamorous mine shaft, with a hidden nugget just waiting for us to find.

It was quite disappointing to find it was only a 140 year old stump starting to rot out…

The hole was filled, compacted and topped with gravel to tidy it up. However, no gold was found, nor was there any sign of any…

The afternoon was spent marking up the next 220 sleepers (enough needed to get over the rise) on tangent 20-21.

All being well by the end of this week, we’ll be up and over the rise, leaving a very short section to go.

We had a very successful day today, covering the length of the line during the track walk, we’ve still got a bit of Maldon Yard to go, but on the whole it’s done.

The usual calibration and checking of the rolling gauge was done before heading off.

And head off we did. You’ll be happy to know all concrete sleepered track was excellent gauge and we didn’t have any issues on the timber sections this time either, which was great – it’s not accidental as we’ve targeted the likely failure areas with the concrete sleepering.

Hours of fun were had with this task. However, very few issues were found, almost all were so minor they were corrected within minutes of finding them.

The odd bolt needed a tighten, but even these were much less than other years, which was nice.

Unfortunately, as predicted, the timber that remains between Pipeline Crossing and Muckleford is well and truly on its last legs. It’ll hold through until March when 100% replacement is proposed however once the really hot weather hits we will be lowering the speeds to keep it safe for trains to travel over, the worst is thankfully confined to a 500m stretch so it’s relatively easy to manage.

The boys decided to set Will up for failure at afternoon tea today, probably a bit of retaliation for making them walk through to Castlemaine in the heat!

Tomorrow’s crew will meet at Maldon from 8am, we’ve got a few bits to finish around Maldon and a couple of jobs to knock over at Maldon before we jump back into some more sleepers next week.

Well, after a clean up and repaint up at the workshops, the north end water column has been stood up again.

The slight irony being we needed to bring in water to give it a wash following the standing, as we did get it a bit dirty.

The columns here are purely ornamental, if we become extremely flush with cash, we may one day install the plumbing, however there’s a few things to tick off the jobs list first.

Today’s gang decided to enter in a very mobster like fashion, giving an almost intimidating feel….. thankfully, the intimidating wasn’t overly long lived.

The main task of the day, although it have seem like a bit more of a side quest, was to inspect the track around Castlemaine Yard, which returned some extremely favourable results, the best results we’ve ever had here – which is good given the effort we’ve put into it in recent times.

We did get a surprise upon discovering this little brown snake having a nice sun bake beside the platform at Castlemaine, thankfully no aggressive was shown by any party and after confirming our bunch were of no interest to it, the snake slithered away.

The south end column, although we forget to get a picture… has been lowered and transported up to the workshop for the same treatment. Having these painted will lift the appearance of the area greatly and we look forward to when the whole place looks spick and span.

Thursday’s crew will begin track walking duties from Maldon, starting there at 8am before trudging off in search of faults.