A very successful day today work wise, however only a very slight improvement photo wise unfortunately…

And yes unfortunately one is just a zoomed in view of the other.

What it’s showing, of attempting to, is that the down leg is now continuously 80lb rail, from Midland Hwy Crossing to Sawmill Road!

The rail is all cut in and bolted up, however so far it’s only fastened up in about 12 locations across the bridge, to match up with the theodolite marks from earlier in the week. First job tomorrow will be to complete a 1 in 4 tie up of this rail, so we can begin work on the other leg.

Hopefully, there will be more photos tomorrow, to explain the process much better than words. However it’s very simple, just more time consuming than plain normal track.

Tomorrow’s crew, collecting the yellow truck from Maldon at 7.45am then out on site from 8.30am.

A good strong effort on the photography front today, with a whole one photo, which didn’t even show anything related to the work being undertaken!

Anyhow, in a brief round up, the matching insulated joint has been installed and all the rail installed yesterday has been clipped up.

The majority of the day was spent measuring, cutting and preparing the rails to go over the bridge, as they were all exactly different lengths. One we’d got everything prepared, they were all bolted together off the bridge, where it’s easy and then as 2 separate big long strings of rail (approx 160m each), were dragged onto the bridge, in readiness for the rail swap and to provide the anchor point for the harness restraints.

We’ll be back into it tomorrow, with the plan being to install the wire bonding between the joints on the crossing side of the Insulated joints, before beginning the rail change up on the bridge. Meeting out on site, access from Midland Hwy Crossing, from 8.30am.

Quite a change of pace today, with some of the very last of the 60lb being swapped over for 80lb.

We managed to resurrect the ballast brush, to help flick rocks clear and that made the job much easier, given the thick layer of ballast here, it was going to be a lot of digging otherwise.

This section is part of the track circuiting for Midland Hwy Crossing, as such the crossing has by necessity been made inactive to allow these works, hence why its desirable to do such works in an extended no trains period, here we’re removing the diode at the far end of the  circuit to ensure no damage could come to it.

We flicked up the replacement rails and had a bit of a think about the best locations for joints (as no two of these rails were the same length, so a few needed cutting, best to minimise that however).

It took no time at all and the down rail was in.

And with the new down leg insulated joint for the level crossing, these haven’t moved at all, but given the rail size increase, new insulated joints were required. These are hard-butted with a plastic endpost between the rails to ensure electrical isolation, and the aim being that these are frozen (don’t expand / contract) as any gap here tends to result in the plastic endpost breaking, they’re really easy to install when re-railing like this, much quicker and simpler than in pre-existing track.

Once we’d dropped in the new rail on the Down leg prior, without actually extending onto the bridge, we set about the UP leg.

This one required a couple of cuts to make it all happy, so took a little longer.

Anyhow before long it too was in place in 80lb.

During the day we had Rolf working with his theodolite to give us a straight line to work to over the bridge, as the rails that are there currently are far from straight, we certainly don’t want to include those errors in the rerail.

Everything from today has been bolted up, but nothing has yet been clipped up, meaning we’ll be able to hit the ground running in the morning.

Tomorrow’s crew will start at Maldon to collect the yellow truck then meeting on site, entry is best from Midland Hwy Crossing from around 8.30am.

We’ve had a very good week of fixing things, with the exception of the Takeuchi, everything is back in action. The Takeuchi hitch is off at a place in Bendigo being repaired, it’ll be at least another week away.

We’ve had a chance to finally crunch some numbers on the recent works, with some stat’s below.

In a brief overview, during the past 7 week, we’ve installed 2269 concrete sleepers in place of around 2350 timber sleepers (the old spacings were very inconsistent), all over a distance of 1.73kms (starting at Curve 20 and finishing at Pipeline Crossing). During that 7 weeks, due to Public Holidays and the like, we only actually used 31 of the 35 days available – not a bad effort at all.

It is interesting to note, the timber sleepers removed give an excellent indication of the impending situation this section of the railway was facing – from the recent work, we only recovered:

• 13% of them as A grade sleepers – which are good enough to re-use in our Station Yards
• 37% of them as B Grade sleepers – which are still solid enough timber, however they’re all second/third hand and so heavily spike killed (multiple holes), any re-use of these would only see a couple of years life, if any, as most of these were already showing signs of cracking / rotting in the spike areas
• 20% of them as C Grade sleepers (20%) – they’re still in one piece but not good enough to even consider re-use (certainly weren’t doing any good in the track)
• 30% of them came out as broken sleepers

At any point in time, we would aim to only have a 25% failed timber rate in the track (1 in 4 nearing/needing replacement), however this section (at 50%) was certainly not in the best of the shape, one of the main reasons it has been the first to receive this treatment.

However even more impressive, we hope, is that we’ve finally worked out how to use modern technology sufficiently to not only take a video, but get it up here too!

This starts at Pipeline Crossing and runs through to the Maldon end of these works, hopefully helping to make this a little more clear to those who don’t know the railway in quite so much detail as we do – we hope the quality is okay enough to show the hard work – we’ll try to work out how to improve all these things in due course – at this stage we’re more than busy just getting the work done.

It should be remembered that all the concrete sleepers you’ll see in this video were installed in only 7 weeks!

We’re extremely proud of this little section, and all being well, by the middle of the year, we’ll be extremely close to having all the way from Maldon to Pipeline Crossing completed like this.

It’s not quite finished yet, we’re yet to bring back the shoulders and clean out the drains, however that’ll be pretty high on the list once the Takeuchi is back in action.

Next week, will be a complete change of pace, we’ll be down by Winters Flat Bridge, re-railing!. We’ll begin by re-railing the section from the end of the Midland Highway Crossing Curve to the Bridge, so we can get back into the swing of it before tackling the Bridge.

Monday’s gang will meet at Maldon at 8am or out on site by Midland Hwy Crossing from 8.45am.