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.

Besides tidying up the last of the broken sleepers, checking and lubricating the turnouts, we tackled a few other odd jobs at Muckleford today.

The main being the installation of a small retaining wall, at the down end 2 road turnout.

We managed to make good use of the cordless band saw, to trim some old 60lb rail to the correct lengths needed – just magic these tools.

We then rammed home a few uprights before placing 6 rails to help gain us the height we needed to reach flush with the turnout timbers, backfilled with some dirty ballast that’ll still drain.

We’re extremely proud of how our little wall turned out. We had intended using an old point timber as edging, but in reality that’s just making one more job for future us to worry about, we’re quite happy with just doing the job once we’ve decided.

It’ll make accessing the point levers a million times easier and safer, only just all the bridge abutments and 4 or so more turnouts to be completed in a similar fashion to this now!

We more or less decided to make today the final Friday gang for this year, Will will still be around should anyone get kicked out of home during the preparations for Christmas, however it’ll likely consist of exciting jobs like cleaning out the back seat of the gang truck, doing a detailed track patrol and tidying up the paperwork.

Tuesday and Thursday next week will still be running as normal, check back Monday night for details of Tuesday.