A very successful day today, with Rifle Range Bridge rerailing now completed.

It’s a relatively short bridge, as can be seen when compared to these 40m rails. However, as always with trackwork on Bridges, what would take 1 hour on plain track always takes half a day.

However it all progressed without hitch and the end result looks very nice.

After the bridge was completed, we set about installing a further 3 lengths of 80lb rail into the UP leg.

We’re yet to cut a closure, however, hopefully if we get a few on tomorrow’s gang, we’ll install a few more lengths.

Tomorrow’s gang will meet from 8.15am near the rerailing site, which is most easily accessed by parking on the corner of Nolan’s Rd and Chapman’s Road (entry on the east side of Pyrenees Hwy Bridge), look for the digger and wander up.

Despite the glorious weather that today provided, we did manage to achieve quite an impressive amount of rerailing.

We’ve now got the Down leg rerailed from Curve 8 down to Rifle Range Bridge.

In fact, we did so well that we even did the down leg over Rifle Range Bridge. It’s not quite complete yet, only tied up 1 in 3. However, we’ll remedy that on Thursday, when we’ll also do the UP leg over the bridge also.

Today’s total is a little uncertain… as we forgot to count… but based on the other leg, we assume we installed around 350m of rail, not a bad effort at all for a rainy day.

Thursday crew will meet at Maldon at 7.45am or out at Rifle Range Bridge from 8.15am. Unfortunately, the road is becoming quite slippery, not boggy, but slippery, so it may be wise to take it easy coming down towards the bridge.

We’ll put a more detailed blog tomorrow night. However, day one of the track inspection has gone very well.

We’ll be finishing off tomorrow, meeting in the yard at Castlemaine from 8.15am

Well, today ended up becoming all about getting a decent handle on the Maldon Compound. We were expecting a delivery, which unfortunately never arrived. However, given that the weather was also quite wet and miserable, we focused our efforts somewhere we could seek shelter.

The end result was quite literally truck loads of genuine scrap steel, old pieces of timber, loco parts and trees removed to make a usable space to logically store, sort and get a handle on the quantity of items we’ve actually got.

For anyone who was questioning the funny looking piece of track in yesterday’s photo, this is the actual purpose, a pallet rack, designed to take industrial pallets, it just so happens that for that to work, the two rails are spaced exactly 2’5″ apart (which is nothing in the real world, but it is close to narrow gauge – 2’6″ and looks a bit deceptive.

It’s also been designed to have a second layer installed above to house the lighter items, such as bags of pandrol biscuits and various odds and sods.

It should be noted, all the rail used in this construction was so badly corroded in the foot it never stood a chance seeing life in the track again. The main reason for rail has been to make the thing digger proof!

Thursday’s gang will be track inspecting, leaving Maldon at 8am, walking (hopefully) all the way to Sawmill Road.