In anticipation of renewing Sawmill Road crossing in a fortnight, we’ve made a start on the other work that needs to occur there.

Mainly removing as much of the remaining 60lb rail as possible, ahead of time to reduce the workload next week.

We’ve replaced 37m of 60lb rail with 94lb, as the down side and through the crossing will be 94lb, transitioning back to 80lb just past the crossing, using some welded junction rails, the installation of those rails will occur on Thursday / Friday this week, with temporary small transition back to 60lb for the current crossing, to get us through until rebuild day.

It looks almost no different. However, the rails are a bit taller and straighter.

The UP side hasn’t received any attention yet, which will be our focus later this week. We’ll then, if time permits, replace as many failed sleepers as possible ahead of time, to reduce the work on rebuild day.

In exciting news, the yellow truck has a windscreen again, big shout out to Windscreen City in Bendigo for their speedy service with this one.

Thursday’s crew meeting Maldon 8am or Sawmill Rd from 8.45am

It was a glorious morning and the signs were that the roadway saw a fair amount of traffic last night, helping to make it compact.

This particular gravel doesn’t seem to want to firm up like it usually does, but hopefully it’ll be right in a few days.

We spent today completing the approaches and giving the area a thorough tidy up.

And we’re very happy with how it’s come up! The roadway surface, being gravel, continues to need maintenance, but the track should see all of us out!

In the late 1980s/early 1990s, an advert was made at this exact location. We claim no rights to it, however it does form part of the railway’s history.  https://youtu.be/UDiQdsiKvCw?si=SKDA9yorHOEfBhCF

It’s a little hard to tell from the ad. However, we can assure you that it was filmed here. A few of the people involved on filming night were out helping us rebuild this crossing today!

Enough time was even had to head back out in the bush and prepare some more concrete sleepers, a good few hundred are now ready for insertion when the time comes, which won’t be next week but will likely be from mid to late September onwards.

We didn’t have our resident Thursday photograph on hand to catch all the excitement today, however we did remember to take a few. The first shot was about morning tea, by which time the old was out and most of the new was in!

In what seemed like no time, we had rails in, cut to length, bolted in and clipped up!

Post lunch was the ever exciting job of lifting to level, ballasting and tamping.

We’ve given the ballast a very thorough tamp, lots of vibration from the tamper, and hopefully, it’ll stay where it’s meant to. The old ground below was brilliantly compact and hard and evidently very well draining.

It wasn’t long before we were adding gravel and rolling it in, we though the truck would be a good weight, however the digger appears to have a much heavier footprint. It’ll settle a little so we’ve got a bit extra on hand to top it up when it does.

We spent the afternoon focusing on the crossing itself, meaning we still have the approaches to get to the correct height and tamp, which should be relatively straight forward. We’ve got one little kink to pull out too, we had it perfect, but it moved during lifting, thankfully it’s in a easy location.

A massive thankyou to Mount Alexander Shire Council for their assistance with the road closure and gravel, we couldn’t do it without them.

In very unfortunate news, we had some very serious damage done to the yellow truck upon return to Maldon.

We returned to find an individual helping himself to some of our stores of items (using tools he’d bought himself to unbolt items that he believes are rightfully his), and he didn’t take too kindly to being told to return the items and retaliated by damaging our truck.

2 broken mirrors, a smashed windscreen and a broken indicator. Undertaken with a shifter, many threats were also made to our staff, upon our request for him to return the item he stole.

The police are involved, however the individual did leave the site against the direction of police, with the items he intended to take.

He is a most unwelcome visitor to the railway, with previous negative interactions.

If anyone sees this vehicle, registration 1SG 9HW at any location around our railway or others, please contact the police and indicate he has a history of stealing railway items. His first name is believed to be Jack, and he is probably known to a few railway groups.

Unfortunately, his behaviour today was highly inappropriate, and he is certainly not doing the railway preservation movement any favours. The vehicle and individual are pictured below. We also have some great video footage of him smashing the window and throwing punches! But we’ll leave that with the police until charges are laid.

It has soured what should have been a very pleasant and successful day.

Hopefully, tomorrow is less eventful! We’ve still got a bit to do, and we’ll be meeting down at Woodlocks Lane from around 8/8.15am.

Apologies for the lack of blog yesterday. However, we have a little more to share today.

Tuesday began by lining the track on the up side of the crossing, it’s been at bit odd for some time and was the perfect excuse to correct it.

We replaced an additional 10 sleepers either side of the crossing, to reduce the total amount needing attention during the crossing works.

However as we still had Wednesday’s (today’s) trains to content with, it had to be trafficable.

The result was a noticeable dip through the crossing, but it was still quite within scope to permit normal train running.

And just to prove it, we were on hand for today’s last movement through the old crossing.

Once the train was clear and we’d received the track back, we began preliminary destruction!

The approaches have been lifted and where possible the old fouled ballast scraped aside, we’ve also reprofiled the surrounds to ensure drainage.

As expected the road bed is good, tidy and rick solid, so we won’t be disturbing that any more than we have to now.

Tomorrow’s road closure starts at 7am, and we’ll be on site around the same time, ready to pull apart the crossing and begin digging to depth. Join us tomorrow to see how it’s done!