Ladysmith Tourist Railway outside Wagga shores up historic tracks to Tumbarumba Road with new sleepers

During the group's monthly open day on Saturday, accreditation manager Alan Ward showed treasurer Wally Bell the ropes of how to use a Gemco sleeper inserter.

Having completed the theory portion of his training, Mr Bell started hands-on training for the inserter, which had is completely manually controlled.

The inserter, a decades-old piece of machinery made in Perth, uses a hydraulic boom with claws to push new red gum sleepers underneath the rails.

Mr Ward said he hoped to replace sleepers out to Tumbarumba Road from Ladysmith in order to maintain the gauge or distance between the rails, which was vital to preventing a derailment.

"It's a matter of ongoing maintenance and once you're finished it's about time to get started on the other end again," Mr Ward said.

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Some of the current sleepers are at least 50 years old and starting to rot away.

"You need one out of every six sleepers to be good so we are maintaining it to the required standard," Mr Bell said.

"We're doing it bit-by--bit, we aren't rushing anything and we are doing it six sleepers at a time. We had 140 sleepers pinched from the yard so we act a bit cautious now.

"We now only bring in the sleepers that we are going to put in under the rails."

The railway, which celebrated its 100^th anniversary last year, is hoping to regain the legal permission to carry passengers on larger carriages for the first time since 2003.

Sections of the railway are technically still in operation, having never been decommissioned by an act of Parliament, but the line has not seen passenger services since the 1970s or grain freight since the 1980s.

The railway holds a public open day every second Saturday from 10am to 2pm.

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