The line now ends in a cutting which we are gradually extending. I chose this route to avoid a patch of macrozamia (primitive palm-like trees that don't get above ground level). You can see one on the left. Also there would otherwise be a shortage of fill material to repair the line lower down.

Obviously progress is slow, but eventually the end of the cutting gets far enough beyond the end of the track that throwing the spoil into the truck requires some care. When there is room, the track gets extended to the face and the cycle repeats. The rails are six metres (20') long and are laid with staggered joints. This means the rails on one side started with a half length. The other half is used at the other end. To extend the line by three metres (10') we remove the half length and replace it with a full one, and use the half length to complete the other rail. The rail ends would only line up perfectly if both ends of the line were parallel. In practice there is a large error in the rail ends at the top of our line due to some irregular lengths (available as scrap) being used lower down the line a few years ago. To get the truck as near as possible to the face we use an off-cut of Unistrut to extend the short side. This arrangement means that for three advances out of four (think about it) we can advance in 5' steps. The other time we still have to throw the spoil 10', or use a temporary track panel that partly overlaps the built line.

	Here we see that the trench has reached far enough to fit the half rail in place of the Unistrut, so we can lay some sleepers and advance towards the face.
Sleepers laid, left rail swapped and Unistrut moved to right side.
	First skip loaded!
Gravity is all we need to bring the spoil down to where its needed.

See you next time this web site is updated. Next week? or next year?