We had a nicely successful day today, with the remaining timber sleepers (from the concrete sleepering) stacked and bundled.

We’ve prepared all the necessary materials for the resleepering works at Castlemaine and loaded them onto trucks and rail wagons as appropriate, ready for transport down there later this week/early next week.

Thursday’s crew will begin at Maldon at 8am, working our way progressively towards Castlemaine undertaking a few odd jobs along the way, if we knock those over suitably early we may make a start on resleepering, otherwise we’ll be ready to get into it on Friday.

We’re back into a fairly regular program of works again from tomorrow. The next few week’s focus will be around replacing sleepers and point timbers in Castlemaine Yard, however before than can occur, we need to get everything sorted up at Maldon so we can head off to Castlemaine for a few weeks. So that’s where we’ll be tomorrow, Maldon Yard, from 8am.

This week is going to involve lots of catchup maintenance.

There will definitely be no workdays on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday and tomorrow’s activities may not be overly productive for the crew (lots of standing around in the cold and wet) so it’s recommended if you’ve got something better to do, please stay home where it’ll hopefully be much warmer and drier!

We’ll be back to normal next week, check back next Monday for all the details!

On what began as a somewhat dreary day, it proves to be very pleasant and extremely productive! Job one was adding in the extra gravel near the water column and giving it a good compact (the digger wheels are great for this).

It was the onto jacking, ballasting and packing the last little bit not completed yesterday.

It didn’t take too long at all and that was completed.

That was proceeded by lots of tidying up, boxing up and rebuilding the roadway, this time much narrower and clearly defined.

The area where the old oil store track was, was compacted and levelled, improving its appearance enormously.

It’s come up looking the best it has in many many years.

We had enough time left over to stack a few more loose sleepers into bundles, only a few more hours and we’ll have this task completed!

The biggest news of the day was that we finally managed to acquire a fuel filter for the gang truck (which has been parked up here for 2 weeks awaiting a filter… we’ve heard lots of excuses as to why one filter has been so hard to get… yet another supplier managed it in less than 2 days.).

More to the point, it now goes again and and we’ve given it a good clean out in the cab.

Anyhow, after the extremely intense program of works over the past 4 months, there will be a bit of a slowing in things for a while, which the staff take some leave.

As such, tomorrow’s workday has been cancelled and there will be no workdays next week at all – the following week Tuesday and Thursday will function as normal then from the week after (July 15th on, things will be back to normal, Tuesday/Thursday/Friday workdays).