faulcon1

I have two Telerail DVD's of men who used to work in the final days of steam. One bloke was at Rose Grove shed and told of the story of the last duty of an 8F loco. It was not filled with water or coal when it came on shed and this bloke then a fireman was putting the loco to bed as he'd done many times before. His driver couldn't understand what he was doing. He was throwing the fire out and his driver told him to leave it. His driver said it didn't matter if the engine dropped a plug as it was now going to be scrapped. This bloke was speechless at the drivers attitude and just couldn't understand why the driver would even think that way. Another 8F 48773 was allocated there in the last days and it was known then that the loco would be preserved. This bloke was indignant. He said all these other 8F's who had worked tirelessly over the years were all to be scrapped and then along comes this new comer which was preserved. He just didn't think that was right.

Young is a sizeable inland town on the now closed Blayney-Demondrille cross country line. The town is known as the Cherry capital of Australia. The railway station building is still very much there but now has a different use. It's the local tourist information center. Young Railway Station seen from the road side. Seen from the station platform side. A carriage in the bay platform is used by a local motorbike group as a storage shed. It's lost it's buffers. The box on the side is actually a wall mounted air conditioner. The coach has been substantially altered with all the windows being plated over and new door openings. This is looking towards Kingsvale station (now closed and demolished) and Demondrille where there was a junction with the Sydney-Melbourne line known as the Main Southern Line. The signal box at Demondrille still stands but the huge coaling stage which serviced steam locos running between Sydney and Melbourne was demolished many years ago. The nearest major town to Demondrille is Harden. This is looking towards Cowra. The lean to structure is part of the wheat silos now only road served although there is a constant push to reopen the whole line from Blayney on the main western line through to the junction at Demondrille. Heavy trucks and b double trucks cause huge damage to local roads hence the push to reopen this line.

These photos were taken on the 19/11/2018 and they show Grenfell Station as it is today. Grenfell was the terminus of a branch line off the now closed through line from Blayney to Demondrille closed in 2009. The junction station was at Kooratha. The branch line is still all there and is now cover with thick grasses and bushes. Grenfell Station for the road side and my little aussie car of course. Think of it as an Ivo Peters moment . Grenfell station from the platform side complete with old carriage. I don't know where this railway line lead. To the turntable or ash pit perhaps? The towns wheat silos and load bank on the left. Once road and rail served but now only served by road transport. The former goods shed now used by the local "men's shed" group. They too have an old carriage.

Next station on from Mudgee is Gulgong. The station is closed but the railway line is still active. Gulgong Station from the platform side. The former load bank where goods wagons would be loaded. The former station masters house. Unknown base of former structure but may have been for the goods shed. The road side of Gulgong Station. Damage to the fascia board allowing birds to nest in the roof space.

I finally got a photo of Mudgee Station. Only the road side as an awning has been erected on the platform for the Indian Restaurant.

Yes the Adelaide-Darwin line was built for freight. The Ghan runs on that line and makes money because it's run by a private company. There is a proposal to build the Melbourne to Brisbane freight only line which is well and truly mired in politics but could be made easier if they decided to reopen the Blayney to Demondrille cross country line. It's all still there if thoroughly overgrown. They'd need to put a link line in on the main western line for the line which goes to Mudgee and the next station on at Gulgong which is on a still active line going up to Ulan and avoiding Sydney altogether. The main problem is that both the Mudgee line or Gwabegar line (it's official name) and the Blayney and Demondrille are still government property. Governments here don't like private companies taking on their disused railway lines. Why? I don't know but maybe losing face has have a lot to do with it. A private company may make the line a success where the government couldn't. These companies want to avoid Sydney because in the morning and evening peak hours there is a curfew in place where no freight train is allowed to run. The commuter trains must have the network to themselves.

Forgive me, I don't know what you mean. The whole line closed in 1984. A government decision that effected many railway stations and lines all over New South Wales. Rail freight transport is in serious decline in NSW and the trucking industry is in it's ascendancy with nearly all goods that once went by rail now go by road truck, mostly in what we call double "B" trucks. On the Sydney to Melbourne main line the line takes a snaking course which keeps speeds down. The Sydney Melbourne Motorway is a four lane road and in places a five lane road where you get three lanes in one direction for a steep hill. Double B trucks almost have the motorway to themselves in the night hours. Often branch lines failed due to low speeds. The track work was often of 'Pioneer Standards" using light rails and often just dirt for ballast. As roads became better and cars got faster the rural branch lines just couldn't compete. The Tumut branch line is just one such line. But many a branch line is still there gradually being taken over by nature and in years to come large steel girder bridges will be demolished due to the effects of time, weather and no maintenance. Some lines are only seasonal being used for wheat trains where locos are branch line types running at very slow speeds due to lack of permanent way upkeep. The government's decision to close the lines wasn't called a defeat, but a strategic withdrawal. The same thing.

I have an Apple computer and for sideways shots I put them through iMovie and then rotate the image so it's right way up. Did a lot of that on my new kitchen at home.

Pouring with rain at home so I was musing myself on YouTube when the English Show Mock of the Week popped up and one of the jokes in there has stuck in my mind. It was in the segment "Things you wouldn't hear in a fitness DVD" "Come on stretch, bend over and touch your toes, that's right stretch, stretch, imagine your toes are made of chocolate you fat f#ck.

With garden railway it all depends on how the railway will be located. High level or ground level. High level is easier on your back but is as ugly as sin and very intrusive and not aesthetically pleasing in any way. A ground level line or near to ground level in OO is still perfectly feasible but you don't want to use real ballast type materials that the larger scales use. There are rubber coatings used in kids play areas which maybe suitable as long as the track pins hold firmly. They're poured like concrete but use a special binder. Try to get a colour that will represent ballast, like grey. Outside I wouldn't bother trying to ballast the track as any idea of scale modelling is lost in OO outside. You will of course need to clean the railway before each and every running session. A battery powered leaf blower will get the worst of the blown debris off and you could make up your own bar with track rubbers attached to it to gently clean the Peco Streamline code 100 nickel silver track. Forget code 75 as you want the extra depth in rail height and the plastic sleeper base is made to withstand the rigors of an outdoor life. Even small insects can't eat it. Signals are ok as long as they can be detached and taken indoors when not in use if using semaphores. Colour lights are ok outdoors but you may want to cover them when not in use so they don't get chewed. Buildings you can use Bachmann Scenecraft or Hornby Scaledale as being made of resin they'll survive out of doors easily although you may lose some of the finely detailed parts attached to them. Remember with OO it's 1:76 scale and if you were 1:76th normal size your garden would be a frightening place.

There's not too many people who would have been around at that time of night. It looks like whilst in storage it became a ready made canvas for the graffiti artists/vandals. Still it's nice to see one set preserved. Well done indeed.

In 2000 Paul on my first visit to the UK I went up Snowdon on a train pushed by a diesel and we didn't go right to the top because at that time the summit station was undergoing major refurbishment. We stopped just short of the last major climb. One could have walked to the summit but as you said the mist was rolling in so I wouldn't have seen much anyway. I was glad to have rugged up taking heed of a warning given by Jeremy English in one of his Railscene videos years ago. "The mist can come in quite quickly making warm clothing desirable at all times" He was right about that, some of the passengers were quite lightly clothed and they were shivering as we stood on the mountain side. I could have done with my "Ugg Boots" but made do with my railway work boots and two pairs of socks. When I left the railways in Australia having taken a redundancy package one of the store men said to me "oh I hear you're going to the UK. So you'll need some new steel capped work boots to trudge around soggy England". Those boots like the ones I now wear were heat, acid and oil resistant.

The two last photos of my previous post show two items not in the Oberon Station precinct. What looks like a railway carriage is actually the driving car of a DMU. It is in the Oberon Bus lines depot which was shut and this was the best view I could get thanks to the fence creeper still being in it's winter guise. The round part on the end is where the headlight once was. The other photo is of a signal box on the branch line itself between Oberon and Hazelgrove. Looking at the photo Oberon is to the right of the box. The two motor cars on the loading bank platform were from the Bathurst Historic car club. The blue one is a Chevrolet and the other is an Austin A 40 Somerset. When mum and dad went on a round Australia holiday for 12 months at one place they went to a motor museum. Dad was very upset that an Austin A 40 was in the museum as it was the car he learnt to drive on in England. Dad said to me that you know when you're getting old when the car you learnt to drive on is now only in a museum. I was told by the people there that the farmers who's land borders the line don't want the trains to ever run again. But the OTHR has a lease for the full length of the line and both local and state governments are very keen to see the project succeed. The line was always unfenced allowing stock to roam over the permanent way at will. As speeds were slow then and no doubt will be in the future when the line is running once again the chance of cows, sheep and horses being run down and killed will be very slight. Between Carlwood and Hazelgrove the line climbs very steeply on gradients of 1 in 25 with very sharp curves. In the days of steam a Z19 0-6-0 tender loco although the tenders used on the line came from scrapped Baldwin 4-6-0 locos and were of bogie design to cope with the sharp curves. The Oberon Station building has walls of precast concrete wall sections so that white ants wouldn't eat a timber framing and weatherboards. Even the station buildings at Hazelgrove and Carlwood (both gone now) were made of precast concrete wall sections. The station building at Carlwood was at track level with no platform. A raised small platform section was build entirely out of timber (old railway sleepers) one coach in length to serve as the platform at the Tarana end of the station. There was even a toilet block provided there also built with precast concrete walls. Hazelgrove too had a raised all timber platform and like Carlwood there was no guard rail around three sides or even seating. I guess one would wait in the small station building and upon hearing a train approach one would then climb onto the raised timber platform. No doubt the driver would give a long whistle when approaching the station to give those inside the building plenty of time to climb onto the raised wooden platform. The DMU's number (that the DMU in the bus garage) has been provided by a reliable source. It's No. 607 a 600 class driving motor. If you wish to know some of the history of the rolling stock they have here's the website for the railway. Much more detail is included there than can be provided here. Of particular interest on the OTHR website is the Ron Preston collection of photos. http://othr.com.au/

Today I went out to the Oberon Tarana Heritage Railway as according to their website they're open on the 1st Saturday of the month. I get five days off every three weeks from Saturday through to Wednesday but it's not always on the first weekend of the month. This railway is still in the embryonic stage but they're very keen. They have a full lease on the line or what remains of it from Oberon to Tarana. Here's some photos I took today.

Well one thing that they (the bureaucrats) haven't achieved yet.....is to have track workers here in NSW clad in all over high vis orange work wear. They wear high vis orange vests with silver reflective strips but their trousers are railway issue dark blue.

Have a look at this video of 6029 between Tarana and Bathurst. This is a cab ride. This bloke Bevan Wall often gets a cab ride on mainline steam. How he manages it I'll never know but I'm thankful that he does. Here's another one of Bevan's acesss to an area no other rail fan seems to have. Here's another of Bevan's excellent work with a pacing shot via a car track side. Like the pacing video above this footage is on the Unanderra-Moss Vale line which has many steep gradients of 1 in 30 as it climbs the escarpment and on a sunny day offers stunning views from the train. But not today. The length of the line from Unanderra to Moss Vale is 35miles and originally there was nine stations between Unanderra and Moss Vale. https://youtu.be/KW1JH5ktpPE The final Unanderra Moss Vale video is once again of the two 38's with a cab ride on 3830. She was restored to working order in 1998 for what was regarded then as an astronomical amount of money. Four hundred thousand pounds. This was a loco that hadn't been in steam since 1967. Later this loco suffered a burnt boiler and her firebox is knackered and so is the boiler barrel apparently. Her chances of ever steaming again are not good.

I didn't see any shaking of hands with the people in the carriage opposite either in Australia or the clips from Germany. If people trespass and get run down then that's their problem. Look at the girl in the US who was standing right on the sleeper end with the UP 4-8-4 coming at high speed towards her and it knocked her down and killed her. That's not a problem for the UP it was her problem. People trespass onto the railway lines all the time and you don't see trains being banned because of it.

Perhaps in the UK it's the suing culture that now rules. Perhaps that's what frightens the authorities is this culture of a guaranteed lottery type win if you have some sort of mishap that you can blame on someone else. In the 60's yes it was different. You could ride in open wagons on little used freight only lines and when the Drummond T9 and Caley Single 123 went to the Bluebell on the third rail network photographers streamed off the platform onto the permanent way. Even Ivo Peters said he was waiting for a bright flash and a cloud of smoke as a photographer stepped on something they shouldn't have, namely the third rail. If the authorities told people if you act in a foolish way and injure yourself you aren't entitled to any compensation whatsoever from either network rail or the owners and operators of the steam trains. People these days don't want to take any responsibility for their own actions. It always has to be someone else fault so I can get money out of them. If that culture was terminated quite a lot of things that were once common place could become common place again. Perhaps also in the UK and I don't mean this unkindly there is a culture of "we can't do this". Rather than look for solutions to problems we'll just say "too much H&S, other regulations so we can't possibly do this". I like those German clips although they seem to like very parallel running which does make it a bit too smokey for passengers on the trains as no one is going to have the windows closed. The Germans have a very busy rail network and they seem to manage it and this steam parallel running isn't something that happens every weekend. It may happen once a year. So you have an altered timetable. People are used to that with permanent way work, late running trains, accidents. But in the UK "oh we can't do that".

Yes unfortunately there is. Australia no longer leads the world we just copy everyone else. So if the UK and the US have a lot of bureaucracy and puts loads of hurdles in the way of people who wish to run trains on the mainline, then Australia has to have it as well.

6029 came up today on it's way to Rhylstone for a series of shuttle trips. I had no idea what time the train was coming up the mountains I just knew it was coming sometime. Of course once I heard it whistle it was a mad scramble through the hedge onto railway land to get this shot. No time whatsoever to set up the tripod.

You may have seen on the side of the Garratt's frame small white rectangles which are actually self adhesive reflective strips. You may have noticed that the carriages have them too. Our level crossing only have half barriers like they do in the US and some have no barriers at all. There is no slow approach and stop for trains here. People will frequently try to beat trains on the crossings and some pay the price for doing so. Also 3526 is at last in her proper livery. For years she carried royal blue with gold lining but that was incorrect. The 35's only carried that livery and only a few of them carried it 3526 being one of the few but in her original condition or as built condition to haul the Caves Express in the 30's. She was rebuilt in the 1940's and out shopped in lined green the livery she now wears. Oddly enough she and her sisters were designed by a Mr E.E Lucy who trained........on the G.W.R His wife had terrible joint problems and her doctor told him to get his wife out of England to somewhere much warmer. So Lucy got a job as the Chief Mechanical Engineer on the New South Wales Government Railways.

Thanks Paul I did. Luckily some of the preserved railways operate mid week even out of school holidays. Alright there maybe only one engine in steam but that's better than nothing at all. I don't even mind diesels. There were only a few days of drizzling rain and one where it pelted down all day. Other than that there was a lot of sunshine. I spent quite a lot of time in the Peak district as there's a lot to see. Chatsworth House was a disappointment and a tip for you all. If you get Shanghaied into going to Chatsworth then take your own food and drink. What's on offer there is nothing special but you pay through the nose for it. It reminds me now of Billy Beefeater in the Tower of London who said to a group of people that what was once a torture chamber still is. It's a gift shop now but he was told to say that shopping in their gift shop is a wonderful and pleasurable experience. He added I suppose it is especially if you like spending your hard earned money on cheap tat at extortionate prices. Chatsworth House is like that. I want to go back and I will for I want to go deeper into the old Dinorwic Quarry and also take a look at Llanberis Quarry which is on the other side of the valley and ride up Snowdon in a train being pushed by a steam engine of course. I also want to go to the East Lancs Railway as i was going to go there this time but one of the annual galas I went to clashed with an East Lancs gala. I think it may have been Llangollen. I certainly lost some weight in the UK trudging over fields looking for a good spot to film the trains. One chap said to me that railway enthusiasts do a lot of walking when there's a gala on. All the weight is back on now.

Yes something like that but all participants being steam. You could have in a four engine race an A3 or A4, Merchant Navy or West Country, A Duchess or a Princess and a King or Castle with all trains being run for the benefit of the general public not just steam fans. In other words no pre-booked tickets. Show up on the day and buy a ticket.

Although the ruling gradient is 1 in 40 there are steeper sections of 1 in 37. Now although the Lickey Incline is 1 in 37 that gradient is only 2 miles long and arrow straight. Cowan Bank is 5 miles long and far from straight. The load behind the 36 is a "water gin" which is the half round tank wagon and five heavy mainline coaches. I think even a Duchess would find the going hard on that gradient. In the old days standard goods 2-8-0 banking locos were stationed at Hawkesbury River to assist trains up the gradient.

I don't know about spare parts they'd all be gone by now but all the other surviving Garratts exist in one piece so to speak. They are all complete but that doesn't mean they can operate. They'd all need a heavy overhaul with many replacement parts having to be made from new. But to operate them like 6029 one needs a lot of cash. It's said that one bunker of coal alone cost $10,000. Unlike the South African Garratts and that includes the NGG's on the Welsh Highland where they only have a water tank over the front engine unit, the 60 class have the same plus a water/coal space over the rear or hind unit. The 60 class are far from economical runners and on longer tours an old petrol tank wagon has been converted to a new role of holding water. Coal consumption isn't economical either and the locos have an automatic stoker they aren't manually fired. In the old days a 60 class on a coal train had it's stoker fail. The crew hand fired it to the end of it's journey. They then just slid off the engine suffering from fatigue and total exhaustion.