Well, after a slightly less than successful week last week, digger wise anyhow, today has actually been very successful, with the little digger now fixed (turned out to be a very simple bit of gunk in the way of the selector cylinder), however we would appreciate some credit for the impressive piece of engineering we did on Thursday to keep the digger in gear! Ratchet straps always a handy toolbox item!

And on the big digger front, its new slew reduction gearbox is now in and fitted! It arrived on Friday, and we’ve wasted no time getting it installed. We ran out of time to connect up the hoses today, but we’ll get to that tomorrow or Wednesday, give it a good test and then send it back into the field to do another 20 years of work!

Friday’s last minute workday was quite successful too, with around 100 fishplates removed, shortened and reinstalled.

It’s not a lot of fun, but it’ll save us hours of work when it comes to resleepeeing.

We’re now well past Bendigo Road with this, approximately 1/3 of the way along this rather long straight.

Tomorrow’s workday, however, we’ll be back at Boundary Trk, meeting at Maldon from 7.45am or out on site from 8.15am. We’ll select the precise job based on the weather in the morning. It’ll either be dropping out more sleeper plates or installing concrete sleepers. Fun either way.

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.