Friday’s sleeper trains saw a further 700 or so sleepers dropped out in various locations.

Today and tomorrow will see those piles distributed as required beside the track, and as such there won’t a Tuesday Workday this week (or next week).

Thursday and Friday workdays will be running as usual, with a mixture of fishplate changing just up the hill from the old tip crossing and then jumping onto bundling up the gluts once the weather gets a too unfriendly to keep changing plates.

Thursday and Friday, meeting at Maldon at 8am.

An action-packed day of collecting sleeper from the stockpiles and dropping out as needed beside the track.

We did, however, get to test a rather uninspiring, but actually amazingly effective ballast brush, developed earlier this week in the hope of reducing the backbreaking labour of removing rock from around the dogspikes.

Mark 2 will use something a bit better than a steel rope found lying in the grass, however consider we’ve cobbled it together for less than $20, we’re staggered at the result, it requires about 4 passes over the rail to get a good result, especially in the heavy rock, it managed 4 passes over each rail from Pipeline Crossing to the start of the long straight near Bendigo Road, which has probably saved us nearly 1 full weeks worth of work flicking rock away manually – definitely worth the hassle.

A follow us with the blower has left things looking very neat and tidy, with the spikes clearly exposed and the foot of the rail clearly visible, important factors for the upcoming resleepeering works.

The great plume of dust John was blowing around here did eventually settle, however, not before coating him thoroughly.

The sleeper dropping out went very smoothly. We didn’t do a count of the exact number we handled today. However, it would be nudging 1000.

The dropped out sleepers really do put the job into a nice visual perspective now, it’s an enormous number of sleepers!

We’ve made the job a little bit smaller today however, by stacking and bundling up all the gluts that had been used to stack the sleepers in the piles, we’ll collect those up at some stage and rehome them.

The main purpose of today’s activity, was to make room to unload a couple of sleeper trains tomorrow, which given the cuttings, embankments and wet ground, are a bit few and far between.

Tomorrow’s crew will meet at Maldon from 8am, our sleeper train should be leaving Maldon shortly after 8.30, all going well.

Following on from the rain earlier this week, things are now drying out again and we’ll be back into the exciting job of moving around Concrete Sleepers again tomorrow.

Meeting at Maldon at 8am, after then we’ll be somewhere between Maldon and Pipeline Crossings, the main bush track through there is nice and dry for anyone heading out that way, the track immediately beside the railway however is very muddy with big puddles.

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.