On the Right Track - The Australian Way - August 2012 - Qantas

trainspotting new south wales
on
the
right
track
A railway museum in the
NSW Southern Highlands
evokes the golden age of rail
travel and is a labour of love by an
enthusiastic band of volunteers.
words michael stahl
photography thomas wielEcki
Engine No.6040: the
powerful Garratt
AD60-class steam
locomotive
riving into historic Thirlmere, a leisurely
95km south-west of Sydney, at the crest of a rise, a
sparkling scene unfolds: gentle hills dotted with cows,
a meandering ribbon of road, sunshine glinting on
steel rails. For those parents familiar with a certain blue steam
train, Thirlmere bears a resemblance to the fictional island of
Sodor. And on certain weekends of the year, Trainworks museum
does, in fact, host Thomas the Tank Engine and a few thousand
of his screaming toddler friends. The $30m Trainworks venture,
which opened in March last year, is funded by the NSW rail
authority, RailCorp, and works in partnership with the Rail Transport
Museum (RTM), which has long occupied the site.
“Even with a four-year-old son of my own, I had no idea,” says
Trainworks CEO Rob Austin, a former nightclub manager. “It’s
easier to get 300 drunk adults out of a nightclub at 3am than it is
to get one screaming two-year-old away from Thomas the Tank
Engine at the end of the day. The pull is just amazing.”
NSW’s government-owned railway began in 1855. Rivalry
between colonies resulted in incompatible gauges (track widths)
that persist to this day, but also pushed the design and construction
of locomotives and rolling stock that were the equal of any
in the world. The RTM was founded in 1962 in Sydney and moved
to Thirlmere in 1974. The location was ideal, sited on a bypassed
loop line between Picton and Buxton – today used for Trainworks’
steam and diesel heritage rides – with mainline access to Sydney.
The RTM was entrusted with half of NSW’s historically significant
railway stock, more than 100 items in all. It is maintained
with the love and labour of volunteers. In 2006, RailCorp opened
the Office of Rail Heritage, focusing on the Thirlmere collection.
“The railways would never throw anything out,” says Allan
Leaver, a telecommunications engineer and 40-year RTM
member. “They had such a history for adaptive re-use, to save
from buying new stuff. A lot of what we have in the museum, we
have because they followed that philosophy.”
The 31-year-old Austin says that he is in no way a trainspotter.
“Trainworks is about appealing to a much wider audience, and
obviously families are a massive part of that capture. So we’ve
taken away a lot of what’s messy and oily and cleaned it up to
make it a more enjoyable experience.”
The site was developed in three main parts: the Exhibition
Building with interactive displays and selected machinery; the
covered Great Train Hall where mammoth machines enjoy a
august 2012 QANTAS 57

Exhibition Building:
E18, the oldest steam
locomotive in the
collection, was built
in 1866
Volunteer guide
Roger Grose (above);
the HKL360 mail van,
in use from the 1860s
until the 1950s
(below)
dignified retirement; and the Roundhouse, the
headquarters for the RTM society, which remains
responsible for all the hardware. Just inside the
Exhibition Building entrance (and the Thomasheavy
gift shop), a theatrette projects a multimedia
presentation over a 1916 steam locomotive. The
emotive story helps convey the railway’s place in
the building of Australia.
Nearby is Australian rail’s crown jewel, the
Governor-General’s carriage. Commissioned in
1901 and handcrafted in Sydney’s Eveleigh workshops,
this turn-of-the-century business jet carried
several royal visitors in a career spanning 70 years.
No less interesting is the Mail Van, one of many
travelling post offices that was in use until the
1950s. This fully-equipped example offers a twist:
the mailbag chute is now a spiral slide for children.
Interactive displays illustrate the workings of a
steam engine and tell of the growth – and contraction
– of the NSW rural rail network. Uniforms and
rail artefacts recall a time when the stationmaster
was one of the pillars of a community.
Outside are lined up 13 of the sleek silver
carriages of the Southern Aurora. The legendary
Sydney to Melbourne luxury service will mark its
50th anniversary this year with an interstate run.
Thirlmere local Tracey Lawrence knows those
stainless-steel flanks well. As an RTM volunteer,
she would regularly clean the Aurora of the bane
of all railways: graffiti. “At least, being metal, it’s
fairly easy to clean,” she says. “But the timber
carriages – my heart would just sink.”
The belly of the Trainworks experience is the
Great Train Hall. Four parallel lines represent
passenger and freight rail transport history. At the
head of them stands the imposing, 260-tonne
figure of 6040, a Garratt AD60-class steam
“we’ve taken
away a lot of
what’s messy and
oily and cleaned
it up to make it a
more enjoyable
experience”
locomotive. Introduced in 1957, it was the last
steam locomotive to enter service in NSW.
Arthur Tubby, 70, nods towards the black
behemoth 6040. “Typical of the railways, they
never ended up using them for what they’d bought
them for. They were supposed to replace the old
goods locomotives, but they found they were good
for hauling heavy coal trains.”
Farther along, Tubby stops for a moment next to
No.79, a modest little steam engine with brass
porthole windows. It’s the reason he’s here. His
father was the driver of this loco on the Port Kembla
wharves in the early 1950s. On overtime Saturdays,
young Arthur rode with him.
“I wanted to be a train driver,” Tubby says, “but
my father said, ‘You will get an education and a
proper job!’” Tubby spent his career as a chemical
engineer but, never far from the trains, he became
general manager of the RTM in 1988. He still is.
Nearby is steam loco No.1905, acclaimed as the
first locomotive to cross the Sydney Harbour
Bridge (if only while pulling a train of construction
materials). Information panels alongside engines
and carriages tell of their entertaining stories; staircases
invite on-board inspections.
Impossible to ignore is the passenger steam
locomotive 3820. Designed and built in Sydney in
1947 under chief mechanical engineer Harold
Young, its streamlined and grime-strewn flanks –
preserved under heritage order – silently recall the
speed and romance of rail travel in the steam era.
Soak up the plush comfort of the beautifully
restored, cedar-panelled 1930s First Class
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Clockwise from
above: Roundhouse
workshop where
members restore the
trains; volunteer in
Roundhouse; No.5595
(foreground), a fully
restored D55 steam
locomotive, derelict
when it arrived at the
museum; display of
train manufacturer
plaques in the
Exhibition Building
sleeper carriages, or stand at the wrought-iron rail
and wave a handkerchief in mock farewell.
Steam inevitably gave way to diesel. This
38-class steam loco, explains volunteer guide
Roger Grose, would use 14 tonnes of coal and more
than 36,000 litres of water to travel the hilly 120km
from here to Goulburn. “But a steam engine always
seems alive to me. A diesel is just a big truck.”
At the far end of the Great Train Hall sits the
train turntable and seven-bay Roundhouse workshop.
Here is 3830, last of the 30 38-class steam
speedsters designed and built by NSW Railways
between 1943 and 1949. This example actually
belongs to the Powerhouse Museum, but is being
overhauled at Trainworks.
Grose says softly, “Thirty-eight-oh-one” and a
sigh goes up from the handful of workers. The
bullet-nosed 3801, which led the Bicentennial Train
around Australia in 1988, is currently under major
overhaul – with components at Thirlmere, Chullora
(Sydney) and even Germany – as it undergoes a
four-year restoration. Grose and Tubby clearly can’t
wait to see it come back. And others now can’t wait
to see it for the first time.
c
60 QANTAS august 2012