After many weeks away from this task, we’re back into it. We certainly won’t be back with quite the same intensity we were, however we’ve taken a gentle start into it, preparing a very good number of fastclip type sleepers ready for installation next week.

It’s a little hard to actually show what we did today, however in essence we’ve check many hundred sleepers for completeness and attended to a few hundred that needed bits adding, taking those parts from other sleepers which aren’t usable or had enough other bits missing. It was a fairly thankless job but we got very proficient at it as we went on.

Tomorrow’s work is looking wet, the forecast is indicating rain all day, we’ll still be out there doing more preparation with the diggers, however if you do choose to join us, be prepared for wet weather – we’ll be out on site (old tip crossing near Bendigo Road) from about 8.30am.

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.

Tuesday’s crew meeting Castlemaine Depot from 8am