We had another successful day today, with an additional 54 concrete sleepers installed, all of the last two day’s work has been jacked to smooth any significant dips and given a good squeeze.

It’s relatively slow going, but it’s certainly now settled into a steady pace, and we’re getting into a good rhythm, it seems quite achievable to do all the way to Muckleford.

We’re using a combination of e clip type sleepers and fastclip type sleepers. We’re very well practised with E clips, so that’s no hassle, we’re using them as every fourth sleeper so as to ensure consistent gauge and anchoring. With fastclips being used in between.

The fastclip sleepers have come to us setup to use with 53/60kg rail. Obviously we’re using 80lb (or 40kg) rail here so they’re not quite ready for use. Purchasing the correct items to convert over comes in at around $25 a sleeper and we’re just not quite flush with enough cash to do that! So in our usual ingenious manner, we’ve come up with a suitable solution that we can upgrade when we get the suitable funds, but will be significantly better than continuing on with aging timber!

The solution is simple, by modifying a standard e clip type biscuit, cutting off the little tab bits, they can be placed in the gap between the 53kg biscuits and the rail, filling the gap perfectly (this isn’t an accident, they’re essentially identical to e clip sleepers, just with different clips, so the spacings are identical). They also have the added advantage of being slightly thicker, so they ensure that on the 80lb, the fastclips are very snug on the foot of the rail, they’re behaviour is very much comparable to an E clip in this regard and we’re very confident of their success, however they’re a bit different to install…

They come in from the sides, hand tools are available, but it’s hard work, powered options are available, but expensive and in all honesty for the numbers we can realistically do in a day, probably an overkill, especially as we have an excavator with a grabbing feature, right on the spot putting the sleepers in. It does take a fair bit of practice to get it right, but we’re certainly getting there now, the short bits of angle just keep everything nice and square and stop the grab jaws trying to lift the clips, we also found given these are a little rusty, a few drops of oil makes a world of difference.

A surprisingly small amount of jacking is all that is required to get the rails back to a sufficiently good top for traffic (in all honesty, it’s better now than it was when it was timber! That probably will worsen a little over time as there is insufficient ballast to really tamp things up and make them solid, however using the grabs to squeeze the gravel ballast in place of the tamper does seem to be working well, also greatly quicker and much quieter. Well be keeping a speed restriction on until we can obtain sufficient ballast and a production tamp, but it’s already noticeably firmer and more rigid than it was as timber.

We’ll continue with this on Tuesday, meeting Maldon 8am or out on site from 8.15am

We’re really starting to get the hang of this concrete sleepering now, we’ve comfortably installed 68 (although we seemed to get different numbers each time we counted, so we’ll verify that tomorrow!). That included a bit of a side trip to Maldon to unload a truck. We are still confident before long we’ll be up to around 100 sleepers a day, but we probably won’t manage the 150 we’d hoped to this week.

Tomorrow we should get about 30 or so installed comfortably, meeting at Maldon 8am or on site from 8.15am.

We had another good crack at inserting concrete sleepers today, with another 32 installed, we had a few other tasks to tend to as well today, so not quite as productive as on Thursday.

We’re actually very happy with how little effort is needed to get the track to a quite comfortable smoothness following the concrete sleepering, its much better than we expected.

We’ve now got a 60m ish stretch of full depths in the track, only many kilometres to go now!

We’ll be back into out here on Thursday and Friday, when we’ll hopefully get at least 150 in over the two days, quite possibly a few more however as we’re now learning quite a bit about what to do and how to go about it. Meeting at Maldon at 7.45am or on site (old tip crossing) from 8am

Today was a moderately successful day dropping out concrete sleepers, we managed around 600 sleepers, before the big digger wouldn’t perform. It’s developed a fuel starving issue, we suspect it’s likely a physical item in the tank as the issue seems to come and go and is particularly bad when the machine is on a certain angle! Anyway, that’s now Monday’s problem.

We’ve even put speed signs up for the section we work on yesterday, the 10mph is ridiculously conservative, as we tested the ride at speeds up to 25mph today, the concrete sleepers are rock solid and by all accounts ride much better than the timber sleepered track either side! However, we’ll give it a week to bed in and see how the minimial ballast trackwork holds up, and if all is well, then we’ll raise the limit to a more suitable speed.

As part of getting the sleeper train out of its location in Maldon, we had the need to move this carriage, 30bcpl, which is a currently under restoration. We must say we took the opportunity to admire the work being done and the transformation is quite something. Once it’s back in traffic, we would highly recommend going to inspect it!

Tuesday, all being well, will be a day of more concrete sleepers insertions, meeting Maldon 8am or down by the tip crossing from 8.15am.