We had a big day of finishing off and tidying up today.

Lots of jacking and tamping, after the addition of a little bit of rock in a few places.

We can comfortably say that within a few mm, this section of track is now level, something it hasn’t been for an extremely long time, as long as any of us can remember.

The hero’s of this work are the hydraulic jacks, we wouldn’t even consider this without them.

It’s a little hard to see in the pics, but hopefully the relative uniformity between the rails compared with photos of earlier in the week is noticeable.

We’re certainly very happy with the results. Given what we’ve got to work with for ballast and lifting equipment, we’re never going to get a mainline quality result at this stage of the game, but we’re miles ahead of where it was when it was still timber sleepers.

Something to be quite proud of.

We had a very pleasant surprise today, with beef and gravy rolls put on by the McCorkelle’s, it was extremely well recipient and a welcome addition in today’s cold. We’ll certainly see if we can twist their arms to repeat this for the other gangs sometime soon, to help commemorate and celebrate the enormous resleepering effort this year – we’ve hit 3515 sleeper now! (All since March).

The day wasn’t over there however, in preparation for the last major works before handing back the week-long occupations, we needed to gather a few lengths of 60lb rail, from Pipeline Crossing, which was successful achieved.

We’ll be beginning some fairly major Turnout Rejuvenation work in Maldon next week, which will likely require better rail than what’s currently buried. We’ll be knocking out access to the water column, turntable and headshunt for a bit so it’s very opportune to do it while there’s no weekday trains.

We’ll certainly be working Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, however Wednesday may become a machinery maintenance day, check back for details next week, all starting 8am Maldon Yard.

We had a mighty impressive day today, with 157 concrete sleepers installed, completing the straight section down to Woodlocks Lane Crossing.

Job one, however, was to load up the fire in readiness for some warmth at morning tea.

Before long, we were into it, starting at the top and working downhill.

The final clip was pulled just before lunch time, not a bad effort at all.

Following lunch, a big general tidying was had, including loading up all the drums, collecting old timber etc…

Before beginning works on making the ramp down to the crossing, of which a small qty of ballast was required, especially given that this will be here for some months, we have used ballast rather than just scraping up gravel.

A quick run up and back yo bring back what small amount of gravel ballast remained was undertaken prior to beginning the exciting job of jacking and packing the track.

We’ve still got a fair way to go with this tomorrow. This was by far the worst section we’ve come across to date. In all fairness, it was also the roughest before we started work, so that’s not a great surprise. We’ve removed the biggest dips from one leg and after adding some ballast tomorrow we’ll remove the crossfall from the rest, it won’t be perfect but it’ll be much better than it was before.

We’re quite proud of our efforts here, and hopefully, if we get time tomorrow, we’ll have a few stat’s to show off just how much extra re-sleepering we achieve in this period than we’d first thought possible.

Tomorrow’s crew will meet out on site from around 7.45am. (Woodlocks Ln)

Only one pic today, however we’ve installed the 1 in 2 (a further 78 sleepers) and brought up enough sleepers to finish this off tomorrow, we were a few short.

We’ve also collected almost all of our last stocks of pandrol clips, so before we have another big effort, we’ll need to secure a good few more!

Tomorrow’s gang meeting at Maldon 8am or out by Woodlocks Ln shortly after.

We had a very successful albeit wet day today, we’ve inserted and clipped up the 1 in 4’s down to Woodlocks Ln, a total of 78 sleepers.

It was so cold and wet we actually built a fire, which proved to be very comfortable at break times.

Tomorrow’s crew will be business as usual, starting at Maldon around 8am then out on site shortly after.