We ran a works train today, for the purpose of getting all the gear we need up to Maldon for our next small project.

We’ll be renewing both turnouts and the headshunt at Maldon. Everything in this area has only ever seen minimal maintenance and its fair to see its condition highly reflects that. Almost ever rail you can see in this picture has signs of heavy corrosion of cracking, so before it does let us down, we’re going to replace it!

We’ve begun by remove some excess soil from beside the track, it was some of the most glorious garden soil you’ve ever seen, but it wasn’t ideal for building railways on, so we’ve reused it to landscape the edge of the loading ramp to make the task of mowing much easier.

We’ll be lifting everything from the compound gates to the end of the headshunt, levelling the gravel and starting again – as what’s there will be excellent road-base, it’s just not high enough these days to permit drainage needed (things tend to settle as the centuries roll on!)

We’ll begin this exciting task on Thursday, unless the rain is torrential, but we’ll leave just enough to run around trains until next Monday, when it’ll all come up.

Thursday’s gang, weather permitting, meeting at Maldon from 8am

We very comfortably managed another 80 concrete sleepers today. We’re well on the way to getting this section complete.

It was all very usual and routine today, nothing too exciting or out of the ordinary.

By early afternoon we’d knocked over all the clipping up and were able to complete all of the usual Friday jobs such as tidy up, jacking and sleeper bundling.

Following the squeezing and minor dip correction (which was actually worse before hand anyhow!) It has come up looking very smart. We’re well over half way to the crest of the hill and we’re still hopeful of knocking it over this year, although this job in the warmer weather isn’t great fun.

Tomorrow’s crew will be up at Maldon, making a head start on our next project up there, meeting around the depot from 8am.

We’ll be out at it again tomorrow, we’ll see what the weather brings before we decide our exact plan of action. However, we’ll meet at Maldon from 8am.

We spent today making alterations and adjustments to the Castlemaine Table, this was a follow on from our previous works there, we can’t resolve all of its issues without removing some very old bends in the frame, however it is better.

We then moved on to removing and renewing a failed signal wire pulley timber near the signalbox.

The end result came up very well and works much better now! The pulleys don’t keep trying to fall over every time they’re operated now.

The afternoon was spent having a very thorough check, lubricate, and clean up of the signals and points.

Tomorrow’s weather is looking wet and given our next few jobs are most definitely not wet weather jobs, it’s probably best to call off the workday tomorrow. Things should be back to normal on Tuesday however.