We had our last big tidy up of Castlemaine Yard today, following on from all the recent works there.
It’s certainly not manicured, however it’s a vast improvement over when we started, both from a track condition point of view and an aesthetic one.
The afternoon was spent returning our full suite of vehicles and equipment from Castlemaine back home to Maldon.
Thursday will see us back into the re-sleepering groove, we’ll need a few days of preparation things before we’re headlong into it next week. Thursday crew will meet at Maldon at 8am, heading out to the old tip crossing just past Bendigo Rd shortly after.
We’ve had a slight change of plan tomorrow, we’ll be meeting at Maldon at 8am. We will still be heading to Castlemaine. However, not until a little later in the day.
Today we completed the last of our little rerailing effort for now, 71m of rail installed into each leg.
It all happened with great ease, in the same basic style as Yesterday’s work, even having enough time to give it all a tamp and tidy up as well as break up most of the old 80lb rail removed – this rail would be fine for a low to no use siding or as rail to make stuff (such as low retaining walls or sleeper cradles etc…) so we’ll finish off breaking this up on Tuesday before we load it up onto a wagon for storage down at Muckleford.
Today we set about rerailing 3 road at Castlemaine, the original 80lb rails are well past their useful service life, and given the rather heavy use we expect from this track, it was time to replace them. We were given some longish lengths of 94lb from VLine some years ago when they were rerailing their track nearby, so we’ve used this at the Melbourne end of the platform to replace the very worn 80lb.
It was all pretty normal process stuff for us these days, however we made use of the recent resleepering with screws to allow the sleeper plates to be kept in position and gauge automatically held for us without needing to do any additional work. We were also able to drive a dogspike down the screw hole without having to redrill or crossbore – a big effort saver.
The order of works may seem a little illogic. However, it was all about being able to get diggers over the works to avoid extra manual handling. The platform leg was completed first, but once that was in and spiked up, we began on the other leg.
It’s quite surprising how excellent a lot of the old timber sleepers still are – they’re mainly gray-box – a very durable local timber thats now hard to come by. However only one was spike killed sufficient that is didn’t take a crossbore or spike up and that’s pretty good given the average age of 20+ years, we certainly don’t get that life from redgum!
The exciting news of the day was the workshops/civil BBQ lunch, put on by Max and the railway, which was a very welcome thing! Thankyou! It was nice to catch up with everyone, a thing that is a little harder to do with the workforce now spread over the railway. Hopefully, we can manage a bit more of this stuff in the future.
Tomorrow’s crew will meet at Castlemaine from 8 am, when we’ll complete the last 33.7m of rerailing (that’s the last length of 94lb we have available). It may be quite some time before we get back to complete the rest of 3 road, however this will remove the very worst of the old rail.
VGR Civil Blog 