The success story today was that we’ve now completed drilling and spiking to Rifle Range Bridge, however we broke the digger again – it must have been a Thursday, always on a Thursday!

The high / low range gear selector keeps jumping out of gear, it’s had an issue for years not always meshing correctly, but today it decided to just not mesh at all. Anyway, a ratchet strap onto the selector arm held it there well enough to get it to Maldon, hopefully it’s just the selector mechanism itself, as the gearbox portion behaves perfectly once its actually into high or low, so fingers crossed easy fix, but… let’s not get too hopeful, unfortunately with the age of the machine, these things are likely to keep cropping up.

We divided our attention instead to trimming 6 hole fishplates into 4 holes, same as previous but this time using a cordless band saw, a great improvement! We’ll cover that in greater detail tomorrow, as that’s what we’ll be doing.

Meeting approx 200m on the UP side of Bendigo Road Crossing in Maldon from 8am.

We had a very successful day on Tuesday, with all plates and spikes dropped out to Rifle Range Bridge, all plates inserted under and a few hundred metres drilled and spiked!

We should easily knock this over tomorrow, even if the weather is forecast to be a bit wet in the afternoon.

A keen eye might note the funny coloured wheel on the digger…

We had a crack at using the telehandler’s wide single wheels in place of the diggers’ usual dual wheel set-up. We have had no end of trouble for years with the tyres chewing out prematurely, they just don’t contact enough of the rail head sufficiently, particularly on one side (a slight design issue with the hirail). So we gave this a shot and it worked perfectly, far better, more stable and significantly more grip on the rail head, so we’re now on the search for some spare rims to set the machine up like this permanently – let us know if you’ve got a few in the shed as they’re proving hard to find. It’s just a fortunate fluke the two machines are interchangeable!

Tomorrow’s crew will meet at Maldon at 7.45am them out on site at Boundary Trk from 8.15am.

It was just that sort of day.

Great fun was had at Muckleford, separating a big pile of various steel goodies combined with mud, ballast and general mess.

It was all in aid of getting more sleeper plates onto pallets ready for the next leg near Boundary Track.

However, the great innovation of today was the sorting table! It took us a few incarnations to get right, however we’re now very happy with it.

It holds a bucket’s worth of stuff to sort and can be easily scraped underneath to remove the ballast/dirt mixture. We also found if this is scraped out regularly, you can easily recover anything that might fall through without much scratching around.

As well as cleaning and stacking 6 pallets worth of plates, we’ve separated all the smaller items into discrete piles, which will make collection later a much easier task! We’re quite happy with this contraption and no doubt we’ll be back doing this next Friday, to get any more plates – once we’ve dropped out this lot and recovered the pallets.

Tuesday’s workday will be dropping these out, starting at Boundary Trk from 8.15am, no need to meet at Maldon.

It was a bit of a long boring day, however all dogspikes are now driven in (into holes drilled yesterday and today), all the way from Boundary Trk to Rifle Range Bridge, along the UP leg. Just all of the other leg and then down to Brown Street to go!

The plan was to use the excavator to tamp up the section Boundary Trk to Sawmill Rd, while the spiking was occurring. However, the tamper had other ideas, deciding after about 20mins in that one it’s tynes would rather crack off its weld and stop working. If it’s not one thing it’s another!!!

Once that was done, collecting the old timber sleepers was undertaken between Sawmill Rd and Boundary Trk, with a little more to go, then it’ll look quite neat and tidy again.

The offending part is now down at the Castlemaine workshop for repair when they get time.

The digger was instead diverted to dropping out concrete sleepers from Boundary Trk down the hill until we ran out, approximately 160 were dropped out and roughly another 100 are needed to finish down to Rifle Range, however there are plenty there now to keep us busy for a good while, however we do need to complete the spiking of the down leg first.

At the end of the day, we ran the digger through to Muckleford, so we can begin sorting through the piles of mess to collect enough sleeper plates to do the down leg next week, we’ll be setting us a sieve table to hopefully help reduce the back breaking bending over. Meeting at Muckleford from 8.15am.