2024 has been a big year for the Civil Gangs. Around 4760 concrete sleepers installed, 2 level crossings renewed and the last of the 60lb rail removed from the running line, just to name a few of the big highlights.

Below is a very brief photo collection from the year.

We’re very proud of our efforts and hope the photos show off what a massive amount of work 2024 has seen.

January – it was very much a month dedicated to getting sleepers out of stockpiles and onto the ground.

February – A month of Turnout building and Bridge Works.

March & April – The big sleeper effort began – taking only 7 week to re-sleeper from Curve 20 to Pipeline Crossing.

May – re-railing Winters Flat Bridge – leaving only Sawmill Road Crossing in 60lb between Maldon and Castlemaine. A good few sleepers were installed back near Maldon too.

June – Lots of action, with concrete sleepers installed near Maldon along the straights and major turnout maintenance around Maldon Yard.

July & August – saw plenty of maintenance work around Castlemaine Yard

August / September – 2 level crossings were rebuilt, Woodlocks Lane and Sawmill Road.

October – Major Turnout renewal works in Maldon Yard

November / December – The last big push, to removal all the timber sleepers between Maldon and Pipeline Crossing, giving as 4.2kms of continuous concrete sleepered track.

There was an enormous amount more, just check back through the archives of the blogs to see all the enormous amount of work that was achieved in 2024.

2025 is shaping up to be no less impressive, with more turnout at work at Maldon to occur early in the year, some bridge works and thousands more concrete sleepers to install! It’s only 3.2kms to get to Muckleford from Pipeline Crossing so we’re going to give it a red hot crack! As always, we could always use an extra pair of hands. We’re also desperately needing funds to help purchase the required biscuits and clips needed to complete the planned work for this year – check out the donate page for all the details – anything would be greatly appreciated.

Work is now back on as usual – Tuesday 31st of December will be a regular work day at Maldon Yard, Thursday the 2nd and Friday the 3rd will also be at Maldon – continuing on with the turnout building works.

The following pics are from the 20th Anniversary Celebration Train a few weeks back – showing off our recently completed track, the loco and train in all its glory and part of the group we had with us helping to celebrate the event!

It’s a little hard to believe that it has already been 20 years since we ran the first VGR train right through to Castlemaine Station.

The 18th December 2004 saw the first test train run into Castlemaine to check the signalling, flashing lights, platform clearance and test the turntable.

The first consist and a very proud bunch, all having a very big part in the project.

It must have been a success as only a few hours later K160 returned hauling a train of members and volunteers to enjoy the experience first hand.

The pic above shows the first public train on the 19th December 2004 and a keen eye will note the Railway Reopen sign at the Level Crossing.

Fast forwarding 20 years and we settled upon this date – Thursday 19th December 2024 as the date to celebrate – 20 years since the first public trains into Castlemaine. The combined occasion was also the Civil & Mechanical branch Christmas breakup as well as a great chance to get together and celebrate not only the massive achievement that was getting back to Castlemaine, but the enormous amount of work that the past 20 years has seen. Unfortunately due to being too distracted with speeches etc… not too many pics were taken.

The celebration day saw around 70 of us, current, past and hopefully future track and project volunteers and managers gathering for special train from Castlemaine to Maldon, with a minor stop to show off the works of 2024 before having a well earned lunch and a few drinks at Maldon Station.

It wouldn’t be a true civil function without a good few speeches. Various recollections from the railways past, the project to Castlemaine, the people that make it all possible and power of a volunteer workforce were discussed and many stories shared. A range of well deserved awards were presented to various long term volunteers as well as a range of comical awards for those who had managed to disgrace themselves in imaginative and fun ways over the past few years!

The day was well received by all who attended and did an excellent job in showing off the importance of teamwork in our organisation. Thankyou to everyone who has been a part of the organisation – particularly in regards to our infrastructure, it’s that maintenance work over the past 40+ years that has kept us going – we’re having a big push now to make that maintenance more sustainable into the future, however the railway wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the years of hard work to keep it running – Thankyou.

Easter 2026 will see us celebrate 40 years of operation – pencil that into the diary as hopefully we’ll be a position to celebrate that event in style!

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!

Today was very momentus, we’ve now installed all the concrete sleepers requires you 100% concrete sleepers Maldon to Pipeline Crossing.

It’s a long way that we’ve resleepered this year – 4200m, which is over half way to Muckleford and 1/4 of our overall track length! It’s been a massive year.

They’re in, the hardest, most labour intensive, the most time and resource consuming part of the resleepering work for this section is now behind us!

We set out to resleeper from the curve pictured above to Pipeline Crossing this year… and we’ve well and truly exceeded that ambitious target. It’s been a slog. However, the work we’ve put in this year will have dividends for decades. The job is far from over, we still need to complete through to Castlemaine (although that seems far more realistic and much less daunting now), we still need to obtain and distribute many many thousands of tonnes of ballast and get in a production tamping crew to get the track up to a standard that will be sustainable for our limited resources.

We’ll do a piece closer to the end of the year with the details of our plans for next year, however they focus very heavily of resleepering Pipeline Crossing to Muckleford Yard, a distance of 3200m, which based on this year’s experience we should be comfortably able to achieve. Funding the work will however remain a struggle – please reach out if you’re able to help.

We’re actually not quite as ‘done’ with today’s little task as the above may read, approximately 40 sleepers still need their final clips pulled, we’ve got a mountain of clean-up to do and we need to run through from Curve 21 to Curve 20 fixing a few geometry issues we didn’t get to during the resleepering – all should be achieved this week however if we can get enough people on the ground on Thursday and Friday.

Thursday’s gang will meet at Maldon at 8am.