We had all the toys out for a play today, with the aim being to reduce the lineside grass and remove a few bits of foul foliage.

The area between Boundary Trk and Rifle Range Bridge had lots of little bits of foliage that were close or hitting trains, so these have been removed and left in the bush to help give a bit of habitat.

The flail mower was off working closer to Castlemaine and the difference down that was is very impressive.

We even tackled a rather messy area of gorse and blackberry, using the ever so delicate rip method we’ve become quite good at.

All these items have been loaded into the tipper and taken to Muckleford for disposal tomorrow.

In amongst all this, quite a bit of whipper snipping has been done around Winters Flat Bridge and the crossing. We’ve got a bit more to go tomorrow but we’re looking pretty good.

The fire restrictions come in Monday and we’ve got a bonfire heap at Muckleford to burn tomorrow ahead of that. As such we’ll be meeting at Maldon briefly around 7.45am, then down by Winters Flat Bridge for a little more mowing, then hopefully we’ll make our way through to Muckleford around 10am.

It’s been a busy few days, with very little posted up here, so a quick recap follows.

Friday

Friday ended up being another successful day, with another visit from a train while testing various aspects of all things rolling stock etc… however it did give us a chance to test the newly fitted point lever.

Which was installed, with slight ramp for access, on the opposite side of the track to the previous arrangement (we even used a different lever, but don’t tell anyone – the other one was a bit bent).

An enormous amount of time was spent tidying up the whole area, especially the grass and picnic area, which was in need of some love, we’re quite proud so please come on out to Maldon and enjoy it.

The success of Friday flowed onto this week, with the flail mower brought back into use. A collection of dead branches / leaves / storm fallings having been collected around Castlemaine and transported away to a more appropriate location, to help lessen the fire risk around town and improve the ease of mowing.

Today saw us lend the workshops a hand, helping with some bogie lifts and wheel swaps, overall it’s been productive.

Tomorrow’s crew will have a change of pace, tending to some rather overgrown foliage closer to Castlemaine, that is now contacting the train as it passes.

We’ll be meeting at Maldon at 8am and heading out in force to tackle these issues ahead of the fire season commencing on Monday.

A bit late notice, however we will be working as usual tomorrow. We’ll be meeting at Maldon at 8am and heading off collecting some lineside rubbish before the fire season shortly after.

Well we’ve had a successful few days, with the new trackwork tested with the J class on Wednesday and the track outside the gate more or less completed today.

Wednesday saw the last of the track work installed and a temporary headshunt built, just in time to crawl the steam engine over.

We actually did quite a good job in preparing the ground beforehand, and as such, we were able to run over it with only one minor little section needing some ballast and a squeeze before use.

Today’s crew should hopefully have answered the where is the point lever going question, as job one was screwing the long timbers up.

A rough clean up of the area to remove excess material was undertaken to make it a bit friendly to navigate.

Before too long a layer of ballast was spread, while the last of the point timbers were dogged down.

Then, it was onto everyone’s favourite job of breaking up the rail strings into lengths.

The really really poor condition of this rail is evident in these pics, this work is certainly not occurring before time. Thankfully, the newer rail shouldn’t have the same fate, given how much drainage we’ve incorporated into the design.

A good combination of laser level and manual jacking saw everything outside the gates lifted to its final height, before giving it a good tamp, it has come up looking really quite impressive.

There’s a few small dips in the 60lb still, we’ll hopefully get to those tomorrow, however if we don’t it won’t matter at all, we’ll no doubt have some settlement in due course to correct and we’ll fix it up then.

A few high paced action shots of the first gravel going down.

We’ve again opted to keep this as a narrow strip, we’ve got a bit more gravel to spread tomorrow, however it’s more or less done.

It does look a little funny without ballast, however it’s quite adequate for the short term, as we need to move to other tasks for a while, lineside slashing etc…

In completely unrelated matters, a few more pics of Maldon station, with it’s recently repainted and rehung sign, repainted timber work and vibrant roses.

Tomorrow’s crew still have a good list of jobs to tick off before the weekend, a point lever and spreader bars to fit, a few sleepers to replace in 2 road and some security mesh to be fitted under the gate to stop people climbing under, it should be an action packed day so please feel free to join us from 8am at Maldon.