Working on the Railway - Sydney style

Here's the next pic of a Silverton lash up shunting wagons at Port Botany. The locos are Alco 45class / Alco 442 class / Alco 600 class (same as 45class built for South Australian Railways) and Alco 442 class.

 

Taken at the same location, a Pacific National NR class, runs around its train to push back onto the dock. The 3 branches you see are from left to right, P&O, CTAL and Patricks - the three stevedoring companies that serve Port Botany. The NR class is a GE dash9.

 

This one isn't taken on the Sydney freight lines... but used to run over some portions of the line on a regular basis. The 86 class electrics were built by Commonwealth Engineering. They were designed for highspeed freight work and express passenger services, one telling point on what type of service a locomotive is designed for is the wheel diameter. large wheels are usually found on locomotives used for light tonnage highspeed work. funnily enough after the demise of loco hauled passenger trains and locomotive changeovers at the electrification borders, they found themselves employeed on coal trains from the western coal fields to Port Kembla, south of Sydney. When Freightcorp was sold and became Pacific National, the operators felt that the cost of overhead hire wasn't justified by it's low tractive effort and they were retired. Rumours abounded as to what was going to happen ranging from selling them to the Dutch, using them on passenger service on the Bankstown line and using the shells for Diesel electrics. As it was stress fractures were found in some of the frames and many ended up on dead row. Silverton Railway ended up purchasing some (not sure of exact number) for use on work trains withing the metro area and that's what these 4 are used for today. They were used on the Bondi Jcnt turnback construction (not wanting diesel fumes in the underground) and are often seen on RIC inspection trains.

 

Some were sent to Werris Creek and some were sent to Parkes, the reason being the closure of Delec at Enfield
the only work the 4 at Eveleigh get now is top and tail on the AK inspection cars with 2 spares to cover for brakedowns

 

Nice shot Sten,about 4-5 years ago I dug out the the road bed for the Patricks trackage,far rhd track.All sand through there.

 

Alan,

it is sad, and there are alot of residents who would want to see them return to the metro instead of being woken up at 0200 by 4 EMD567's at 8 notch. they were killed off because of the extra charges required to run them, hire the path to run the train on a per tonne per kilometre charge then hire the overhead, esp since any freight that originates in Sydney goes outside the electrified area or to a non-electrified yard and vice versa so there was an engine chane and additional costs in money and time involved there

 

When did this happen, and who was interested in buying these engines?

 

no idea on that one, it was just a rumour going around. There is a little saying that exists in the railways "If you haven't heard a rumour on Monday, start one on Tuesday"

 

as far as freight is concerned yes and I hope it never does becuase the current overhead guage is too low and even now they have to use low profile wagons to run 10'6" containers (9' being the roundabout height for ISO containers), CityRail on the otherhand is consistantly doing feasability studies of extending the overhead to Nowra on the South Coast and Picton on the Southern Highlands. although at the moment I think Picton is another of those rumours, but in several more yrs to come I can see it seriously happening with the population increases occuring on the outskirts of Sydney now.

 

ps to that,

I have a network map which I'll put up once the work on RailImages is complete. might make a bit more sence when talking about places

 

in the meantime here is a link

http://www.cityrail.nsw.gov.au/networkmaps/selection.jsp

 

that's only the passenger routes, it doesn't include the freight line. It basically starts in the north at Rhodes, down past Nth Strathfield then turns left past Homebush to Olympic Park (the jcnt just south of that loop) then south to Campsie which is located on the Bankstown line the right to Marrickville across the Illawarra Lines then goes around the perimeter of the airport to Port Botany. plus there is also a line heading from near Regents Park heading right it joins up to the freight line. That line will be extended to follow the main south line from Regents Park to south of Macarthur following the existing right of way.