Tomorrow’s weather is looking a little wet but not as much as was predicted last week, so we’ll take a punt and have a crack at knocking over the straight near Woodlocks Ln, meeting at Maldon at 8am or out on site shortly after.

Today’s effort to install the remaining 66 concrete sleepers needed to finish yesterday’s work went very smoothly.

There was a considerable cross fall (non level track) here and has been for some years, however we took the opportunity of this work to remove this and return the track to level, which went very smoothly and came up looking very smart.

There’s only around 320 sleepers left to reach Woodlocks Ln crossing now. Which weather dependant, should be completed next week.

A bit of a tidy up this afternoon left the section looking much smarter than it was earlier in the week.

Monday, being a holiday will of course be a day off, however we do plan on working as usual next week otherwise – there is rain predicted so that may change things on Tuesday, watch out here Monday arvo for any changes.

The day began with a final tidy up of the section from Tuesday, including a ballast scrape, Jack, pack and general mess collection.

It has come up really nicely, which we’re very happy about. This is quite a considerable length of concrete sleepers now, which looks impressive.

We then jumped around to the straight near Maldon, where we unfastened all the steel sleepers ready for the resleepering there.

Then we begun the resleepering there.

We’ve installed and clipped up the first 22 sleepers (in the 1 in 4 pattern), meaning we’ll only have another 66 to install tomorrow, to give us the first 88 concrete sleepers in this straight.

This should be a nice, comfortable day tomorrow, meeting at Maldon 8am or on site shortly after.

Today marked another milestone, with the final 141 sleepers inserted and clipped up, a total of 188 this week.  This now means we’ve got continuous concrete from Woodlocks Ln to the old tip crossing, quite a distance and one that was certainly due for a very heavy sleeper replacement, as the recoverable timber from here has been quite low.

The boys have now got very familiar with the fastclips and have decided they probably are quicker than the regular e clips, so we’ll need to retract yesterday’s comment about them being slow, rather it was us being the slow part of that equation.

For the immediate future, that’ll be all of these type going in, as we’ll be leap frogging back to the straight out of Maldon Yard, installing VR type E clip sleepers there.

The reason for the leap was simply that we needed to bring sleepers out from somewhere to do the work as it was a section we didn’t think we’d quite get to during the occupations, however we’ve outshone ourselves and this last bit will probably see us through to the end of June and hence the end of the week long occupations. There were almost enough left overs from around Bendigo Road to do this in VR type sleepers, so to save moving them too far, we’ll be using them.

There won’t be a workday tomorrow. However, we’ll be back into things as usual on Thursday, we do still need to jack, pack and tamp the section we worked on today, so meeting at Maldon at 8am or down by Bendigo Road shortly after.