We reached a bit of a milestone today, with all the sleepers needed to re-sleeper curve 20 to Pipeline Crossing dropped out track side, plus quite a fair chunk of the balance down to Bendigo Road.

The great mess of gluts that got left behind, has been collected, stacked, strapped and in most cases transported up to Maldon for return to the sector to assist in future concrete sleeper deliveries.

The afternoon was spent at curve 20, where works resleepering 5 days a week will begin from the 4th of March, giving it a final blow and marking up sleeper spacings.

After decades of replacing timber sleepers on a comparatively adhoc basis, the spacings have crept out to being very inconsistent, something we’d like to remedy with the resleepeeing. You’ll notice the extremely high tech device we’ve developed to help with this job… we can probably improve on this, however it does the job.

Tomorrow’s work will be a complete change of pace, with a head start to be made on installing the new turnout in Maldon, the one we assembled almost a year ago! We’ll make use of tomorrow to get the none essentials removed, to allow trains to still run around on Sunday, then from Monday while we’ve got a week long period of no trains, we’ll pull out the old and install the new. Meeting at Maldon from 8am tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s workday will involve collecting some material donated to the railway to help us make a start on some undercover protection for our trucks.

Today saw us make a great start at collecting the items, however first job tomorrow will be unloading a truckload of material at Maldon, before heading off again to collect the rest.

Meeting at Maldon at 8am

Another successful day dropping out sleepers, around 450 were distributed today, along with a few rails and other odds and sods taken through to Maldon for other projects.

The works trains were finished just after lunch, so the afternoon was spent distributing the stockpiles along the track, which once both diggers are on the job, happens quite quickly. We’ve got at least one more day of this to go to get everything from Pipeline Crossing up to the start of the Bendigo Road Straight dropped out, which will probably be one day later next week.

Check back on Monday for details of Tuesday’s workday.

A rather busy day of sleepers today, with an exact number not known, but in the region of 1100/1200 dropped out into stacks trackside.

The drop out locations were all within 2kms of Muckleford, so we managed to get close to three full train loads out.

We’ve still got sleepers arriving by truck, as despite the vast number we’ve now got, it’s still a few thousand short of the target that we need to replace all our mainline timber sleepers.

We’ve certainly placed a massive dent in the stockpile of sleepers at Muckleford, with only a few thousand full profile sleepers left there now, mainly the stock there is low profile, which will be used in the Muckleford-Castlemaine section on an as required basis going forward. We are hoping, in addition to our ambitious plans for this year, to get a good number of these low profiles out trackside in stockpiles to free up Muckleford Yard for the hopeful delivery of Ballast!

In addition to all the excitement of dropping out sleepers, the gang found time to fix up the platform surface at Muckleford, where various small holes had begun to form, these have all been filled to provide a much nicer surface.

Tomorrow will be a similar day, however we’ll likely not get the same total number out, as we need to get quite a few up closer to Maldon, which inevitably takes a lot longer to achieve. Meeting at Maldon at 8am.