Another very successful day, with many more bolts tightened, particularly those at the escapes, which had become very loose for some reason. It’s slow going, given each pier has in the region of 32 bolts that require checking and generally tightening… it’s a lot of bolts, when you consider there’s about 38 piers! And that’s just this bridge.

There is still a heap to go, however we’re a bit over half way now, so when things on the sleeper front settle down, we’ll return and do another few days of bolts tightening here.

Next week, we’ll have workdays Tuesday through till Friday, with Monday being the preparation day that we lost due to last week’s hot weather. Tuesday’s workday will meet at Maldon at 8am and we’ll get into a solid few months of resleepering!!

We had an extremely successful day today, with most of our list of jobs ticked off by early afternoon.

The main one being the moving of the beams back to where they should be, we bought along all the gear to do a lift of the bridge deck, however when push came to shove, a very gentle push from the digger corrected the beams almost effortlessly! We did however loosen a few bolts first, which probably helped.

A lot of time was then spent aligning the deck and in turn the track.

Before we’d begun aligning the decking.

After alignment! Hopefully the difference is obvious. There is a slight wiggle still a little further on, however we’ll get that one with the re-railing as it’s more of a crippled rail issue.

It was then time to pin the decking in place, which involved fitting 4 of these blocks to each span, from the abutment to just past the roadway.

This was a relatively simple process, whereby 2 screws were installed into 2 adjacent deck pieces, preventing the deck from going sideways, hence hopefully holding it exactly where it should be.

While on site we fitted up new Low Clearance Signs, which should be nice and obvious! But the most noticeable thing is definitely the repainting of the white pile sections in and around the roadway, very obvious now.

The other massive task completed today, as though the bridge work alone wasn’t enough, was a very heavy hand slash of all the level crossings and a massive section around the Winters Flat Bridge, which looks very impressive now.

We’ve even installed a notice, stating what to do if you hit this bridge! It’s simply to call Castlemaine Police so that we can be informed and then deal with it.

Tomorrow’s tasks will focus heavily on bolt tightening, all to the Castlemaine Side of the roadway, the bulk of the other side was completed today while up in the air.

We’ll be meeting at the Bridge from around 8.15am/8.30am.

We spent today preparing and beginning the list of works on Winters Flat Bridge. The morning was occupied by loading vehicles and double checking lots of items were in fact on the trucks, while the afternoon was spent ticking a few jobs off the list.

One of these can be seen above, a pile strap was fitted to a pile showing signs of wanting to split, in this case only near the top, besides this splitting the pile is in excellent condition, so a tried and tested solution to arrest the splitting is to either install a bolt through the pile, for a single split, or if it’s a more complex split, such as here, a band is clamped around the pile to prevent any further opening of the cracks. We also had another pile at the Down end which had a split. However, two through bolts were quite sufficient in that case.

The main job however, is to rectify this horridness! It’s a result of a vehicle collision with the bridge some time ago, it’s as ugly as anything, however given the heavy speed limit we’ve got in place, it doesn’t pose any real risk, but it does need correction and has been on the cards for some time. This is the before photo, however we have spent a good hour or so today improving it somewhat, but forgot to get a photo. The issue is related to deck movement, not track movement (the track is very captive between the kerbs so if they move, I.e. get a nudge from a vehicle then they can move the whole lot, such as we see here).

We didn’t have a road closure today, so we’ve left that section until we do on Thursday, when we also need to move a couple of beams back to where they belong, also victims of the incident some time ago.

We’ve got a good few other jobs that’d be nice to knock over there on Thursday / Friday, one being the installation of new low clearance signs, the other being the tightening of all the bolts, particularly those in the roadway area, as these can be a real pain without a road closure. We’re only going to have the road closed for one day, Thursday, with all of the other jobs being away from the roadway on Friday.

We had initially planned doing work here tomorrow, however the weather is looking awful and a total fire ban, preventing us doing any bolt cutting if needed. Thursday’s looking much more friendly.

We’ll be meeting at Winters Flat Bridge on Thursday from 8.30am.

Today became an odd job day, however probably one of the most successful and productive days of this type we’ve had in a long time!

The list of jobs knock over included

– finishing off the 2nd spike puller assembly

– building a second timber sleeper bundling cradle

– getting the flashing light remote box back up and working in the gang truck

– tightening up the jaws on the big digger grabs

– getting the 2 way radio working in the Hyundai and working out what’s needed to get the takeuchi similarly equipped

– a new crane hook was fitted to the yellow crane truck and the old one was cascaded to a spike puller

– lots and lots of small little jobs were knocked over in addition to the above, things we just haven’t had the time to get to until now

We’re pretty much ready to rock and roll with great efficiency into the resleepeering, just the little bridge jobs to tick off next week, and we’ll be ready.

There will be a blog post with details of next week’s work on Monday.