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.

It didn’t take us too long this morning to get the 60lb concrete track panels back down.

And although there is a few gaps in the progress, it can be seen here that before long it was essentially joined up once again.

There’s still a bit to go on the curve and then the headshunt itself, however it’s all gone pretty much to plan.

There’s obviously still a good amount of ballasting and tamping to go, however that’s the easy and relatively quick part compared to all this work.

One very small part of the day didn’t quite go to plan. It’s a little hard to see in this pic…. but a couple of corner bricks on the platform got a slight tap from the digger.

While we were moving the track panels back in the digger clipped the handrail on the wooden fence and that was the result! Actually it wasn’t that bad initially, but for clearance we did need to move the lump off and aside, it had been loose and moving for some time so at least this forces the issue is regards to fixing it! Any good brick layers out there??

Thursday’s crew will be meeting from 8am where we’ll hopefully finish the job, or at least the bulk of it.

A quick before shot of how the yard looked this morning, before we got stuck into pulling things up.

After we’d lifted the track and levelled the roadbed. It looks quite strange without track there, however we have managed to find a rock solid base down there, which will result in an excellent formation upon which to lay the new track.

We’ve removed a bit more of 2 road than first anticipated, manly due to the rail condition being so poor we figured the extra couple of hours work would pay off in the long run.

Tomorrow’s crew will be in track laying mode from 8am.