The week just gone saw us make good headway into getting concrete sleepers dropped out, ready for resleepering from Chapmans lane towards the Bridge.

We made good use of the digger telehandler combo to get sleepers out of Muckleford Yard efficiently – as the dropout location was close by, it worked well.

Once we’d exhausted the supply in Muckleford we headed out to the stockpiles near where we were dropping out, these required sorting through to sort the usable from the requires further attentions. In the end, the rain dumped hard and saw us have to stop just prior to finishing the job. However, there is very little to go.

This section was largely already 4 hole fishplates, however a few 6 holers remain, we’re part way through knocking that over.

This coming week will see us actually replace some sleepers, starting at the Crossing and heading in the Down Direction.

However, we’ve had a few extra commitments pop up for Monday – so no Workday on Monday. Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday are looking perfectly promising however, so we’ll be meeting at Maldon at 8am or on site (Muckleford) from 8.30am.

What started as tidying up a blown down tree from the weekends storms turned into replacing 10 sleepers and 4 point timbers in Maldon Yard today.

None of them were overly urgent. However, having completed them means we’ll not need to do much, if anything, at Maldon for another 12 months now.

We’re not quite complete yet, so that’ll be job one tomorrow, before we head off to Muckleford to begin resleepering works down there. Meeting at Maldon tomorrow from 8am

Due to the wet, which is very welcome, we’ll not have any workdays this week – it’s become very boggy already, and we’ll use this week to get our planning sorted for the rest of the year.

It’s looking like it’ll be business as usual next week. The plan is to begin the works to resleeper from Chapmans Lane towards Muckleford Creek Bridge.

Today was an action-packed day of tamping the recent sleeper insertions and a few other minor defects – we did a bit of this yesterday too, especially around the depot at Castlemaine.

We did a few other odd jobs while out and about like re-covering the diodes at the end of the flashing light sections.

After the tamping work came a good thorough ballast scrape to tidy things up, which it has certainly done.

We then continued on with our tamping endeavours, correcting various minor dips and twists, all of which seemed to be in awkward locations – which is probably why they existed as its also a little challenging to successfully squeeze these up without pulling all the signalling gear away, but, we managed and didn’t cause any issues.

We then moved on to a quite long bit of settlement by Winters Flat, it’s happened before and no doubt will again, it’s just the nature of certain embankments – probably a result of the relatively so so fill available back during original construction in 1883/1884.

The truck was very successfully bogged and then just as easily extracted – it wouldn’t be winter without a bogging – we think this was the first of the year.

We had one little bit of finish off by Pipeline Crossing – we’d been waiting for the clipping up to address this, and now that’s all complete, we thought it best to tick it off the list while we were passing.

While waiting for the little digger to make its way home, we unloaded the equipment we’ve been using over the past few weeks, ready for next week’s adventures – which are yet to be firmly locked in so watch this space.

We’ve had a good run so far in August, with a good few bits and pieces ticked off.

We’ve got a fair amount of work coming up in the Muckleford area over the coming months, so that’ll likely become a bit of a focus.