We’re on the home straight now. Advantage of a train free Monday was made good use of today, with the 1 in 4 pattern inserted and partly clipped up right through to Curve 20.

We should comfortably get 1 in 2 clipped up tomorrow and the rest inserted, we may even get a good few of those clipped up to.

Meeting at Maldon at 8am tomorrow or on site from 8.15am

Well, it turns out that declaring yesterday hot was an understatement… today eclipsed that – probably not temperature wise but certainly in regards to humidity and lack of wind. It was horrid.

However we did get the remaining 80 sleepers inserted and clipped up as well as fixing a ramp at the UP end for trains this weekend.

That’s all that’s left to go now, until we can proudly say that 1/4 of our railway is 100% concrete sleepered. It’s roughly 170 sleepers, pretty much the same as this week in the adverse conditions.

We should comfortably knock it over next week, as the temperature is far more attractive at mid 20s.

Tuesday’s crew will meet at Maldon at 8am, then out on site shortly after.

Hot… it was hot, humid and inside the cutting just generally pretty horrible.

However it wasn’t without success, we’ve installed and clipped up 80 sleepers, leaving only 80 more to go tomorrow, the final pass is always a bit tedious, however it is generally a lot easier as there isn’t any unspiking or jewellery collection to do.

It’s a very significant section of the cutting completed in a 1 in 2 pattern now.

The section of timber that remains is very comfortably one weeks work, providing everything runs smoothly tomorrow we’ll be in with a very strong chance of knocking it over next week.

Tomorrow’s crew will meet at Maldon at 7.45am or out on site around 8am, it’s very very very likely it’ll be an early finish due to the heat and if the late storm that’s predicted does eventuate it’d be nice to be home before it arrives.

We spent all morning preparing for resleepering, however there wasn’t enough of us to make any significant start on changing any, however we’re well prepared for Thursday.

We did however have enough hands to complete the platform rebuilding works, the majority of this occurred on Monday, however the final touches were placed on it today.

We used a Lime Mortar, as it had been previously, except it turns out this isn’t the first repair here, as quite an amount of cement mortar was found in places and that is likely what caused it to fall apart, we just gave it a helping hand, however the historical patch has certainly damaged a few bricks. We’ve repaired what we could, one day and probably with a lot of money it will need to be pulled right back to ground level and rebuilt in this corner – it’s very likely there is little to foundation left.

The funny coping stone angles are no actually from our repair, they were like that previously, we didn’t gave a lot of scope to modify that unfortunately but it’s at least as good as before and hopefully better.

Once the mortar has properly hardened, likely to be a few weeks, we can give it all a proper clean up.

Various other odd jobs were tended to also, which was nice, however it’ll mean we’ve got a few big days Thursday and Friday to ensure we can complete the resleepering this year. Meeting Maldon 8am on Thursday.