From Crossing to Crossing, we’re now all clipped up! In reality, by morning tea, we were all clipped up. This method did prove to be quite efficient – although we have discovered once everything is nicely squeezed up, the jaws of the digger are just as effective as the power pack – but for not very much money we got to give it a very good test drive.

The morning, however, was quite foggy and chilly, but we didn’t let that dampen our spirits too much.

Once done, we did need to do a follow up run to fix anything the machine didn’t get right or ones it could reach (which can happen in odd cases) – this was a very easy process that took very little time.

We’d completed bits of this yesterday so once we’d finished in the curve, it was job done and off to Donkey Farm Track we went.

Once there, the temporary speed boards that were at pipeline crossing were cascaded to there new home and installed.

We spent some time breaking up the old timber – which makes its removal much easier.

We even found the time to give the drains the bit of a clean out at both crossings.

Given how successful we have been this week – we’re going to celebrate by calling off workdays on Wednesday and Thursday this week – we’ve got a few repairs to effect and some other odd jobs to catch up on.

We’ll be back in action next week, with everything running as Normal Monday through to Thursday – it’ll be a bit of an odd job week – as we’ve still got some tidying up to complete the job and some extra stuff up towards Castlemaine that we can’t ignore forever.

Following on from last week’s big effort to place all the remaining biscuits out between Pipeline Crossing and Donkey Farm Track (pics below) – today saw us begin the clipping up with an item of hired equipment.

It all went very much to plan, with the Down Leg clipped up all the way and the UP leg approximately half clipped up.

The item is a hydraulic Fastclip install / extract device that mounts to a power pack – we have power packs but can’t really justify the expense of a head, hence the short term hire.

We hired this through Kennards Hire (Rail Division) in Melbourne – a shoutout to them is deserved as they did look after us on the hire price and collection time – thanks Kennards.

We even grabbed a couple of videos to show the exciting action! It’s a fancy squeezer.

In essence working this way will allow us to clip up 1000 sleepers in less than 2 days – far far quicker than we could by hand.

Tomorrow’s should see this knocked over very comfortably.

Thursday’s Workday (24th July)

Frosty was Thursday – very frosty.

The task was to pop in these biscuits – typically requiring the sleeper to be aligned / moved / lifted etc…

That was comfortably completed on Thursday and the afternoon was spent marking up Old Broken Sleepers as free to anyone willing to come and collect.

We’ve popped a note at the piles indicating we would appreciate a donation to help support our efforts.

Tomorrow’s crew (Tuesday 29th July) will doing more clipping up – starting again at Pipeline crossing – this time heading along the UP leg until completed.

It’s very likely that we’ll not have a workday on Thursday as we’ve got a Driver Experience Train operating the full length of the Railway.

Although we have technically installed all the sleepers between the crossings in the past few weeks, we have only to date clipped up every second sleepers.

We chose to do this to speed up the process and to mechanise clipping up the bulk of the fastclip sleepers.

It was a very simple process of wandering through dropping in biscuits, and using the digger to adjust any not quite in the correct location.

Any cleaning/tweaking/adjusting was also done during this pass. Meaning when we hire a fastclip head (book in the week starting 28th July) we can just go through and clip up in an efficient pass.

There was a bit of digger downtime where old sleepers were stacked and all the unclipped sleepers were given a squeeze to just make sure they were hard up.

We did extremely well today, getting all the way to the up end of Curve 16 – leaving around a third still requiring biscuits – comfortably only one day’s work, we installed around 2600 biscuits today!

Depending on exactly how well the hydraulic clipper goes, this method will probably prove to save us almost weeks of labour pulling on the clips manually.

We’ll finish this task next Thursday, however Monday’s crew will meet at Maldon at 8am and head out on another exciting adventure.

Following on from our earlier sorting and tidying efforts this week, today saw us get everything away and packed up.

We’ve got heaps of drums of stuff that we may never use but they’re too good to dispose of just yet, so these have been placed in a small wagon, mainly to keep them out of the weather but also to free up space, it’s a bit tight getting the digger in the door but we managed – good luck to the person who tries to get them out however!

We’ve also finished off getting the similar stuff sorted away, rather than being scattered all over the place, this wagon contains point levers, cranks etc.. The repaint on this wagon by the carriage crew is coming along very well!

After much annoyance with the tipper deciding it wasn’t going to start, it in fact turned out not to be the fuel cut-off solenoid, which was the most likely culprit… it had simply taken in a decent slug of air and needed each injector bleeding – not entirely sure why it’s done that but it’ll be interesting to see if it occurs again, which will probably point to a faulty check valve somewhere in the fuel system.

Next week, we’ll certainly be meeting at Maldon again on Monday and Tuesday at 8am, the exact tasks will depend a little on what issues if any we find on the diggers when we go over them in fine detail, but hopefully it’ll be pretty plain sailing.