Project – Track Restoration

Our youth team, affectionately know as "The Apprentices", have been working hard over past few months, replacing sleepers on the No. 1 loco road between the Loco Shed and the Station. The boys have been growing in numbers over the past year and have had some great opportunities to work with different team members across all aspects of the railway, including how to replace sleepers and fix guage. Although they were down a couple of members today, the boys were able to insert and screw another 11 sleepers. It's great to see the next generation really embracing heritage railway and [...]

The equipment was putting up a fight this week but the first section of track restoration from the loco shed has been completed with the track re-gauged and new sleepers screwed into place. Work is now progressing south towards the turntable where old sleepers (or the hint of where sleepers might have been) have been removed and a combination of over 60 second-hand sleepers and recycled transoms have been placed on to the track, ready to be installed over the coming weeks. Having access to machinery has been a huge help in this process as we’re able to quickly move [...]

The next stage of track restoration within Cooma yard has now commenced between the loco shed and the station platform. Sleepers will be replaced on both southern loco shed roads on to the through road and back up the platform road to the platform. That’s almost 1km of track. This work will allow not only allow the railmotors to leave the loco shed but will also allow them to traverse between the loco shed and the platform, allowing visitors to explore the beautiful machines whilst visiting the museum. Degraded sleepers have been marked for the length of the section and [...]

How good does that look? Our team of volunteers have continued their hard work clearing the railway corridor with another important section completed. It’s been hidden for a while but the line has now been cleared from the northern end of the yard, through to the Yareen Road crossing where the team have recently cleared a large section north of the road. It really is getting exciting now as we push further toward Snowy Junction and take another step towards getting trains running on this section in near future. There is still work to be done though, including: 🔹 Further [...]

Operating a heritage railway is no simple task and a huge amount of work has been taking place behind the scenes to get trains back on rails in the Monaro but equally as important (and exciting) is the infrastructure that we’ll be running on. Over the past few weeks, our team of volunteers, assisted by our Work for the Dole participants, have commenced remediation work on the railway corridor between Cooma Station and Snowy Junction to the north. This 4.5km section of track will be the first phase of CMRs return to the rails. Our team have been steadily working [...]