Unfortunately, there are no pictures today, just grumbles.

If the torrential rain wasn’t bad enough, we managed to get all three of our main items of equipment to fail!

The little digger, after another small setback with the tamper early on, it did a few hundred metres before failing in a whole new and exciting way, not catastrophically so but it has damaged a few hydraulic fittings on both the head and the excavator.

The big digger decided today was the day that the little magic box that controls the engine speed would give up the ghost. Thankfully some very classy bush mechanical work with sticks and old rope meant we could jam in on high enough revs to unload a truck and get it back to Maldon so we can pull it apart… again. It’ll no doubt be a 30 second fix, once we’ve done the 5 hours of removing covers and fittings to access the box!

The telehander, showed no interest in doing anything that resembled moving today, which was an issue for unloading a truckload of concrete sleepers, hence the need to get the big digger at least a bit usable in a hurry. This is obviously an electrical issue, it’s very much a wet weather fault and by its nature very hard to successfully diagnose and fix while the rain is pelting down.

The frustration thing with all these faults, and pretty much everything we’ve had lately is related to things wearing out and failing due to age. We’ve not yet had a single failure that could have been reasonably forseen as a maintenance issue, which is nice, however it is a real reflection on just how much work all our gear actually has done. It’s also becoming apparent, now that all the gear is well over 10 years old (telehander and big digger are 20 years old), that not having undercover storage is a fair factor here too, we’re noticing a lot of the components, particularly under the covers where water just cant dry out when they have to live outside, are showing fair signs of being weather beaten.

If anyone reads this and takes pity on our small crew of hard working track blokes, we could really do with an undercover storage shed/ workshop facilitily of our own, so we can do heavy repairs undercover and care for our equipment. Please get in touch, we’d be open to sponsorship, naming, glory or fame to get it across the line (fame might be a stretch…..) however if we don’t ask, we won’t find out. Please contact Will at civil@vgr.com.au if you think there’s a way of solving all our troubles.

On the up side, the district received around 25mm of rain today, so that’ll keep everything look green and fresh for a while longer.

In terms of workdays, it’s now safe to say there won’t be anything this week, Thursday and Friday will be fully dedicated to fixing things. As always if you’d really like to join you’d still be welcome, however it’ll be very much focused on getting the machinery back into a usable state. At Maldon from 8am on both days for anyone who is just itching to help out.

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