Today was a big day of moving and stacking concrete sleepers.

Approximately 300 low profiles were taken out to near Rifle Range Bridge.

A good number were then distributed trackside, ready for insertion later next week, hopefully when the little digger is back in action, just waiting on a couple of hydraulic fittings now.

The afternoon, between showers, was spent loading full profiles at Maldon onto the civil wagons, which have now been placed in 3 road at Maldon to keep them handy, while out of the way.

Tuesday’s workday is likely to involve distributing these sleepers trackside out past Bendigo Road again, however check back Monday for confirmation.

Unfortunately, we got a little distracted with another small telehandler issue today, so we forgot to grab any pics. However, it wasn’t an overly eventful day.

We’ve bundled removed timber sleepers Boundary Trk to the end of the curve. Installed about 12 additional concrete sleepers out on the straight to Rifle Range before needing to go and fix the telehandler’s issue – heavy corrosion on a couple of fuse blades (the fuses themselves were fine, hence intermittent fault in making a connection). The result seems to now work without any hesitation. However, we’ll not say we definitely fixed it just yet!

We did a fair portion of trialling and playing with fastclip type concrete sleepers in 80lb, we’ve definitely come up with an excellent method now – just took us a good few hours!

Tomorrow’s weather is not look marvellous, however we need to get sleepers out to near Rifle Range Bridge, so that’s what we’ll do, rain or shine, meeting there from 8.30am.

A very exciting day today, with many hundreds of concrete sleepers distributed beside the track, most of those dropped off the train yesterday infact. Unfortunately this is one job that does seem to take an age, running backwards and forwards, even using the trolley it still seems to drag on forever! Anyway, only many many thousand to go now. We’ll likely make this a summer job on days when it’s too hot to do much else.

The gang spent their time collecting, stacking and banding up the gluts, which in itself takes a while.

We then moved on to stacking up old removed sleepers by Sawmill Rd for disposal.

In unrelated matters, the little digger has had its rotating head removed to assess the source of the leak. This little O ring seal on the grab circuit valve block was all it was. Fortunately, accessing it is most of the battle. The fixing it is quite straight forward now.

Thursday’s crew will meet out at Boundary Track from 8.30am, where we’ll have a big clean up of all the mess from there down to where we’ve installed sleepers so far.

We managed to get two full train loads of sleepers out beside the track today, approximately 700 sleepers. These were all stored around Maldon Yard and are still arriving, hence the need to make more space. There’s still another couple of thousand to come hopefully, while they look a lot on the train, when they’re out trackside, it’s obvious a train load doesn’t actually go too far.

We’ve managed to get a few impressive stacks out between Bendigo Road and the first curve. However, there will still be a few more train loads needed here to meet the 100% quota.

We also managed to diagnose another small issue with the telehandler’s transmission, a rather rusty and intermittent solenoid coil! The one pictured isn’t actually the issue. It’s one that’s located, of course, in a very awkward location!

Upon removing it, it did somewhat disintegrate, it is possibly still usable, however we have a healthy stock of spares, so first job tomorrow is refitting that and making sure it works, the result of that will dictate what tomorrow actually holds.

Tomorrows workday will begin at Maldon, from around 8.30-8.45am, a little later than usual.