A further little tidying up of the gravel after a drop of rain over night, saw that bit tidied up first off this morning.

It was then onto fitting in closures using replacement rail, as the removed stuff was too far gone to consider reusing.

A big clean up of all our stuff was also had, to make the area both usable and presentable for the weekend.

We’ve managed to cascade the metal biscuits we used while resleepering the Muckleford Castlemaine Section a few years ago, to fasten the 60lb rail to the concretes.

It was then lined and jacked to level, ready for the ballasting.

Once ballasting was completed a good solid tamp firmed it up nicely.

We then applied gravel to the edges to make it usable to water the steam loco, where people will need to walk.

Over in the 1/2 road turnout, a new timber was required at the toe of the points, so this was installed and brought back to gauge before fastened up.

This turnout has reached the end of its useful life, it’s served well, at 140 years old, but it is now getting beyond realistic repair. We’ve got plan to do this a full renewal later this year so we’re just doing the minimum up until then to keep it usable.

It was then given a good tidy up, check, lubricate etc… to finish off the job.

The same process was repeated on the other turnouts to keep everything in good working order.

Today’s efforts have come up looking very nice, there will be more gravel to add next week, however we’ll worry about that next week, it’ll be adequate for this weekend.

Tomorrow will be a bit of a quiet day, the workday won’t start until 10am at Maldon and will probably finish fairly early. It’ll be about getting things prepared and ready for the job next week – which involves removing the old trolley road turnout (as this is very much life expired!). If you were on the fence about coming up, tomorrow’s probably an excellent day to stay home and keep warm.

We had quite a successful day today, with another very cold start!

Be began by squeezing up yesterday’s work, before moving onto disassembling the old trolley road, to give us some space to work while we tackled the next bit.

The next bit being beside the water column. It was all steel sleepers however the rail foot was corroding badly and had resulted in wide gauge, so the easiest and quickest solution is to whip it out the lot and replace with concrete and newer rails.

We’ve fitted and roughly compacted the gravel in the turnout, ready for a bit of rain tomorrow to settle it.

We’ll be meeting at Maldon at 8am tomorrow, we’re well finish off the bit next to the water column and get it usable, then we’ll begin a big clean-up!

We had another successful day, with the turnout now back together, just needing tamping, tidying up and then some clean gravel to re-make the filled area.

This morning started with one of the heaviest frosts we’ve seen in many years – frost was still on the ground in areas around 11am.

We’re pretty happy with how it’s come up! It’s not perfect as we’ve replaced old 1884 rail with slightly older 1883 rail, albeit in much better condition, but at the very least it’s a big improvement. It certainly wasn’t viable, or even really any benefit, to increase the rail size here at this stage, especially while we’ve got a good supply of 60lb rail suitable for this situation – spot repairs.

We’ve used a mixture of ‘S’ screws and dogspikes to really try to hold it in place, the old dog screws that were in there came out very bent so we don’t think they’re quite up to the job in this situation.

Tomorrow’s crew will get this finished off and begin on the other side of the V crossing- the V crossing is holding together very nicely so we don’t really want to tempt fate playing with that until we have to, however the section just past it, is in a very sad state, so while in the area we’ll fix it up.

Meeting Maldon Yard from 8am.

Today’s victim was this turnout in Maldon Yard. It has been largely left to its own devices for 30 years and unfortunately it was really starting to suffer from it.

We haven’t got sufficient time, resources or spare to replace everything, however the area of concern was the section between the blades and V crossing, which is relatively straight forward to rebuild.

However everything we uncovered was certainly beyond repair, this was expected, so we didn’t waste time trying to salvage anything, rather it was just total destruction!

Of all of the rails we removed, each one broke during the process, not surprising given the rust that occurred. However we suspect they might not have been in the best of health to begin with, so they’ve served us very well for 30 years.

A bit of a joint digger effort and the destruction was complete!

We then setup the laser and dug it all to depth, there’s a really nice hard layer of gravel down there, so we were careful not to disturb that.

We did end up deciding to do more than we first planned, near the blades, things looked okay before we disturbed it but they certainly weren’t afterwards.

Before long we’d sourced from our stockpiles sufficient 2nd hand timber to put back in (for these 20 odd timbers we’ve put in, we only recovered 5 – not of good enough quality to reuse either).

This turnout doesn’t conform to any standard plan, so the timbering and rail location is just what works best, however it seemed to be catered for well by our stockpiles of spare parts.

By the afternoon we’d bolted up most of the rail, some needs cutting tomorrow and we’ll adjust the joints so that we can reduce the number that are to be buried (compared to before anyhow).

Hopefully, we’ll also get all of this fastened up tomorrow so we can get it tidied up before the predicted rain on Wednesday/Thursday. Meeting Maldon from 8am.