Today was the start of the detailed track inspection, a six monthly ritual, and quite well practised now.

We began by checking the settings of the rolling track gauge against our master reference and then headed off!

It was a glorious morning, with a few minor tight gauge faults found just outside Maldon Yard, however the magnitude of which was sufficiently small to be permitted in the track for 1 month, and given we plan on beginning resleepeeing there next week… we can rest pretty easy with that one.

We had a few bolts to tighten, but only one needed replacing, in fact we must have just about replaced all the old type bolts in the track now, hence why we had so few that needed our attention at this inspection.

We seemed to set a bit of a record today, the rolling gauge is quite quick, however normally that crew identify a large number of small faults for the follow up crew to fix, however the number of faults was so much lower than previous times it resulted in the follow up crew keeping up with the checkers.

The detailed notes that are taken for each section of the track are done along with the follow up crew, so as to record all faults and the action taken. This does involve a lot of sitting down to take notes, so as to ensure they’re all legible back in the office.

We had a ripper morning tea spot, down on Donkey Farm Track, it’s still a very quiet bush road and a very nice quiet place for a cuppa.

We managed to get the whole mainline, except Castlemaine Yard, walked and checked with the rolling gauge today, about 4kms better than we usually do, which was excellent. 

We’ve got a few faults to fix, nothing of great interest or excitement, but it did reaffirm how quickly the timber sleepers are failing, but that’s not a surprise and if we can keep up our great rates of progress 99% of our major concerns will enter the history books, within the next few years.

We will focus heavily on Castlemaine Yard tomorrow as it will be the first Yard that we know needs work, so we’ll mark it up ready for that work while we’re there. Hopefully we’ll also get out to Muckleford to do a full turnout and siding check there, Maldon Yard may be a little ambitious for tomorrow but we’ll see.

Tomorrow’s gang meeting at Castlemaine Depot at 8.30am

After replacing the 9 failed timber sleepers with concrete, near the bridge, we set about removing the rather impressive dips that were present in the straight off the bridge.

If you compare these photos to those from last week, the significance of these dips is quite noticeable, often requiring 75mm lifts to correct the issue.

We cheated somewhat, using the laser level, set to the gradient, to make the lifting far more uniform and notably quicker, than by eye.

The results however do look quite stunning.

Once we were happy with this section, we headed up to the next bridge, where a similar issue existed, very predominantly on the UP side of the Bridge. A similar method was used to achieve a more uniform gradient between the bridge and a point approximately 100m away. It looks great, but still needs a little further attention but we’ll let that lift settle before returning later in the year (lifting too high always ends in unstable geometry, better to do it a few smaller passes).

We could go forever doing this work. It is certainly more in the wheelhouse of a production tamper, but we do ensure anything reaching a significant state of roughness / defect is corrected with our machinery.

With the low sun, the bright ribbons of steel were very visible from up by Midland Hwy Crossing as we re-installed the 25mph speed board, now able to lift the 15mph restriction over this small stretch. It looks quite impressive we must say.

Tomorrow will be an odd jobs day, preparing for the track walk on Thursday and Friday, so there is no workday tomorrow.

Thursday’s crew will meet at Maldon at 8am, with their comfortable walking boots ready! 

It was a busy morning or drilling and spiking, with the final 160 odd metres completed.

Not that it was overly critical, but as we’re still having trouble with the circuitry, we did pull the insulated joints apart and swap around the plastic components, unfortunately this wasn’t the issue and we’re able to conclude the issue lies in the brain of flashing light control box.

The big digger collected all the extra materials and headed off to Maldon, which proved to be quite a load!

Around lunch time, the rains arrived and proceeded to set in, which coincided nicely with us handing back our occupation for a train to pass through, another test run for the J class.

Given that we were about done and without an occupation, we decided it was drier in the carriages than out on the ground, so we joined them for a trip through to Maldon and back! A very pleasant way to spend the arvo, a great way to experience all of our recent hard work!

Tomorrow’s weather is not looking very pleasant for working, so we’ll cancel the workday and postpone the very final part of the job by the Bridge until next week when the weather is kinder. Tuesday will be a workday, meeting Maldon 8am or on site from 8.30am.

Our day was focused very heavily on tidying up and preparing to install the final dog spikes tomorrow.

However in exciting news… we had to yield our use of the track for this to pass through….

A very bright, shiny and impressive J549 undergoing its first mainline run in just under 500 days!

We enjoyed watching it pass over our recent work at the Bridge so much that on our way back to the Maldon Depot we offered our cheers of support to the loco as it passed over the section of concrete sleepers we completed a few weeks ago.

It was a very impressive sight, sound and like welcoming back an old friend!

Check out the Mechanical blog and the VGR Facebook Page for all the exciting details.

We did do a working test of all the facilities, such as water columns and turntables that haven’t seen much use for 17 odd months, everything behaved perfectly (although we did do a full check over and some minor repair work to both in the previous week in anticipation).

Tomorrow’s gang will have the very exciting task of drilling holes and installing dog spikes, it’s not great fun however it is very literally the last hoorah in regards to rerailing on timber sleepers (the crossing at Sawmill Rd will likely be all concrete so hopefully this will be the last large scale timber sleeper drilling/spiking for some time).

Meeting at Maldon 8am or on site from 8.30am.