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.

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.