G'day all, when I was a young man [a teenage  railfan] I would have thought that harking back 50 odd years was  attempting to penetrate the mists of time!...........but now it seems like just  turning back a few pages to refresh the memory.
 Unfortunately some of those pages are missing or  torn or perhaps just a little bit smudged. Attached are a couple that  aren't.
Peterborough, South Australia again, 1962-63.  Google Earth was unimaginable back then but it is worth a look now, the basic  shape of the 1960s railway establishment can still be seen and the Roundhouse  still stands as a homage to the railway and the town it once served and was  served by.  An aerial photo taken in the '60s would have been mostly smoke  haze.
I've decided to put up two photos this week, partly  because I've been absent for a while and partly just because.
 
 The mines at Broken Hill, just over the  border in New South Wales, shipped their lead ore west to the smelters at  Port Pirie via the South Australian Railways Peterborough Division. The 400  class Beyer Garratts did much of the work but the mines shut down for  a few weeks over the Christmas-New Year period every year and the Garratts got a  bit of a break and the Division went quiet.
408,402,409, 405 and 403 are taking it easy over the  break. That's half the Garratt fleet, the other half must have been out on  the track.
The other pic shows 402 on the table and only a couple  of T class 4-8-0s lurking smokebox first in the shed. That's what you  would have expected to see back then, 48 or maybe 49 weeks  of the year.
Best regards,
Peter Bruce


 
 
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