Today saw us complete the tamping from Curve 9 up to around the whistle post for Brown St, unfortunately at that point the tamper disgraced itself, however we’ve managed to do a repair of sorts this afternoon. So tomorrow’s first task will be to complete that.

We’ve even regulated the ballast up where we’ve tamped, which makes it look very smart.

We’ve still got lots of little dips to lift out before it’s job done, so provided the weather isn’t too wet tomorrow, we should get a good way to getting that completed.

Meeting out on site, Near Rifle Range Bridge from 8.30am

After the past few months of re-railing activities, it was finally time for the final clean-up, always the least glorious part of the job, but in many ways, the icing on the cake.

We’ve bundled any sleepers which have a potential future life elsewhere and stockpiled all broken bits of sleeper trackside for easily disposal.

We completed that task all the way from Brown Street to Boundary Trk and finished off the little bit towards Sawmill Rd that we hadn’t quite completed, just tamping and ballast regulating to go and it’ll look very smart! There are a few dips to remove before we can raise the track speed back to 25mph, which will be the main focus of next week’s work.

We spent the afternoon loading up the old triple interceptor pit at Castlemaine onto a well wagon, its going to find a new life at another railway, and the easiest place to load onto a semi is Maldon.

As a small fill in activity, we levelled the section of roadbed in the depot at Castlemaine, when the interceptors were switched over some months ago, the levels were not quite returned to normal.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have a bucket on hand. However, we did have a scrap length of rail, which proved to make a good smudge bar and some string line levelling fairly quickly gave us a nice smooth base upon which to reconstruct the track.

We’ve even got as far as dropping out the first rails and marking up sleeper spacings, then it was go home time. We’ll be keeping this as a fill in activity over the coming weeks.

Tuesday, we’ll be starting at Boundary Track from 8.30 am, where we’ll go through and remove a few dips and wiggles in preparation for raising the speed limit in the recently re-sleepered section.

We had a very successful day on Tuesday, with the final 88 concrete sleepers installed down to Brown Street!

It’s not job done just yet, still lots of tamping to do and a mountain of tidying up. We’ll spent tomorrow starting out by Rifle Range Bridge, where we’ll set about bundling reasonable sleepers and picking up all the broken bits. Meeting on site from 8.30am

After a few distractions of late, it was nice to be back into replacing failed sleepers. We set out today without too greater ambition. However, we very comfortably installed 73 sleepers between Rifle Range and Brown St, leaving probably 100 to go.

We had completed the 73 easily by soon after lunch, so we set about distributing the remaining concrete sleepers right down to Brown Street, which seems to take forever, moving only 4 sleepers at a time. However, it’s all ready to continue with resleepeeing on Tuesday.

We’ll be meeting mid way between Rifle Range and Brown Street from 8.30am on Tuesday, when we’ll hopefully (maybe a little too hopeful however) knock over the sleeper installation.