On the first workday for 2024, we spent the day cutting up fallen trees, a result of the recent storms.

We had quite a number between Muckleford and Sawmill Road that had fallen, obviously a bit of heavy wind passed through that area. Lots of smaller trees had fallen beside the track and across the access road which all needed cutting up and moving to more suitable locations. That took us most of the day to sort out and tidy up.

There won’t be a workday tomorrow, due to both diggers breaking down on Wednesday (now repaired), we’re a bit behind on a few other tasks so we’ll postpone any further workdays now until next Thursday (11th), give us a chance to catch up before we put everything back into heavy use.

Certainly not a record setter day, but we still managed to get a good few hundred sleepers distributed out beside the track today.

The main dropout locations were by the 87 mile post, in whatever space was available between the cuttings to stockpile the sleepers.

Once the first load was out, it was back to Maldon to collect the small stockpile that had accumulated there, it wasn’t a full load, but still enough to warrant doing.

We even managed a third partial load, with the wagons a little over 1/2 loaded at Muckleford and distributed before parking the wagons up at Maldon for the Christmas period, there isn’t a great number more concretes expected over the next while, however there’s a few other items that’ll be nice to get out of Maldon while there is a few empty wagons available.

Inkeeping with the recent tradition, the digger held us up for half hour or so today, while we rotated a couple of tyres to better place a punctured one for the trip back home from Muckleford, in all fairness we’ve probably got around 3 years longer than we should have out of that tyre! It still has a transmission issue, but it appears to be improving somewhat, meaning the machine is still usable in non critical work. However, we’ll get back onto that issue in the new year.

No workday tomorrow, that’s more than enough work for this year!

A massive thankyou to everyone for another fantastic and extremely productive year, wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Looking forward to catching up again in the new year, with workdays starting back from Thursday 4th January.

Tomorrow will be the last workday for 2023, we’ll have a sleeper discharge train running. Meeting at Maldon at 8am.

Tomorrow we’ll work on getting our various items spread out across the railway back to Maldon. We’ll start at Maldon at 8am and venture out from there.