We thankfully managed to get everything we completed yesterday jacked and squeezed up, before the digger broke down again, somewhat spectacularly.

One of the brand new hydraulic hoses replaced when the rotating head was off only a few months ago, let go, a hole developed without any good reason – not in a location of rubbing, no sharp edges, not too near a fitting, nothing. Very frustrating and although we can probably get the hose replaced at no cost, it now requires the head to be dropped off again to gain access, it also puts a fair shadow over the quality of the other hoses replaced at the same time. That’ll now take up most of late next week.

It wasn’t a wasted day, however it has probably brought to a head that this week was the last major resleepeeing for this year, doing this work in the warm weather is just asking for trouble, so it’ll likely be next year before we resume.

We still managed to get the last of the sleepers bundled and made an excellent start on tidying up the site.

The big digger came to the rescue again, with it now cured of it’s small fuel issue – which after much investigation ended up being a small piece of plastic wrapping inside the lift/priming pump! Which was quite the job to access, deep in the guts of the engine bay, however we can certainly say we’re now intimately acquainted with both of these machines!! The general maintenance is the easy stuff, it’s all this left field stuff that just seems to be taking so much time and effort lately.

We’ll still be working on Tuesday next week. Despite it being a public holiday in some places. The task will almost certainly be related to grass mowing, last of the pre-fireseason tidy up etc… meeting at Maldon at 8am.

Another successful day today, with only around 45 sleepers installed, the exact number still needs counting. However, it exhausted our supply of full depth e clip type sleepers.

The day began by marking up the next section to be done, using this one of a kind broom with a lump of wood screwed to it – at the correct length for the sleeper spacing.

Most of the length for today actually involved removing concrete, with does feel a little counter intuitive, but in the big scheme of things, it makes sense. A little bit of spike pulling was required.

At the Bell Block (insulated joint) for Bendigo Road Xing, we of course had the diode, part of the track circuiting, that required special consideration, besides now being this glorious vibrant colour, very great care was taken to ensure it was not harmed – we’re happy to report that we executed the work without any issues.

There was nothing groundbreaking or new today, just more of the same.

Today efforts actually jumped through to the next run of concrete sleepers, helping to give us quite a decent continuous run of concrete sleepers now.

Obviously it looks very much like unballasted and untamped track, however in appearance it actually doesn’t look any rougher than it did previously and generally looks considerably more impressive, especially in such a long run.

We spent the afternoon bundling and strapping old sleepers, generally organising the site and tidying up.

Tomorrow, we still need to jack and squeeze all of what we did today, and we need to spend a good few hours preparing the next run of sleepers to be installed. We’ll be meeting at Maldon around 8am, as we’ve got a few vehicles to take out to site, hopefully we’ll be out on site from 8.15am.

We’re getting quite efficient at installing the concrete sleepers in this fashion now. An additional 68 were installed on Tuesday, taking us up to a short run on concrete sleepers previously installed when the level crossing was upgraded a years ago.

Quite a decent stretch is now completed and looks remarkably impressive. A few thousand tonnes of ballast and a production tamp will set it off nicely!

We’ll be continuing with this tomorrow, where we’ll actually remove the low profile concretes we installed a few years ago and swap them over for the full profiles, it does seem a little backwards initially, however long term it’s desirable to get the consistency of sleeper type, it also releases the low profiles for use between Muckleford and Castlemaine where they will, in due course, be required.

Meeting Maldon 8am tomorrow or out on site from 8.15am.

We had another successful day today, with an additional 54 concrete sleepers installed, all of the last two day’s work has been jacked to smooth any significant dips and given a good squeeze.

It’s relatively slow going, but it’s certainly now settled into a steady pace, and we’re getting into a good rhythm, it seems quite achievable to do all the way to Muckleford.

We’re using a combination of e clip type sleepers and fastclip type sleepers. We’re very well practised with E clips, so that’s no hassle, we’re using them as every fourth sleeper so as to ensure consistent gauge and anchoring. With fastclips being used in between.

The fastclip sleepers have come to us setup to use with 53/60kg rail. Obviously we’re using 80lb (or 40kg) rail here so they’re not quite ready for use. Purchasing the correct items to convert over comes in at around $25 a sleeper and we’re just not quite flush with enough cash to do that! So in our usual ingenious manner, we’ve come up with a suitable solution that we can upgrade when we get the suitable funds, but will be significantly better than continuing on with aging timber!

The solution is simple, by modifying a standard e clip type biscuit, cutting off the little tab bits, they can be placed in the gap between the 53kg biscuits and the rail, filling the gap perfectly (this isn’t an accident, they’re essentially identical to e clip sleepers, just with different clips, so the spacings are identical). They also have the added advantage of being slightly thicker, so they ensure that on the 80lb, the fastclips are very snug on the foot of the rail, they’re behaviour is very much comparable to an E clip in this regard and we’re very confident of their success, however they’re a bit different to install…

They come in from the sides, hand tools are available, but it’s hard work, powered options are available, but expensive and in all honesty for the numbers we can realistically do in a day, probably an overkill, especially as we have an excavator with a grabbing feature, right on the spot putting the sleepers in. It does take a fair bit of practice to get it right, but we’re certainly getting there now, the short bits of angle just keep everything nice and square and stop the grab jaws trying to lift the clips, we also found given these are a little rusty, a few drops of oil makes a world of difference.

A surprisingly small amount of jacking is all that is required to get the rails back to a sufficiently good top for traffic (in all honesty, it’s better now than it was when it was timber! That probably will worsen a little over time as there is insufficient ballast to really tamp things up and make them solid, however using the grabs to squeeze the gravel ballast in place of the tamper does seem to be working well, also greatly quicker and much quieter. Well be keeping a speed restriction on until we can obtain sufficient ballast and a production tamp, but it’s already noticeably firmer and more rigid than it was as timber.

We’ll continue with this on Tuesday, meeting Maldon 8am or out on site from 8.15am