Monday Morning Photo. 11/04/2011 Part One.

G'day all, Arthur Robinson sent me an email correcting some of my considerable misapprehensions about the railway arrangements at Port Curtis Junction. I had allowed myself to be mislead by Google Maps which of course show today's layout which is altogether different from that in my 1964 photos. The Google Maps screenshot is attached showing the changes, the purple lines are the originals and the blue are today's lines, the north to west curve at the Rocklands triangular junction should be in blue of course. So the line visible behind 935 and 1469 in last weeks posting is actually the old North Coast line and is not going to any port, so much for easy assumptions, thanks Arthur. And also Geoff Kirton who mentioned the changed alignment.

Regards,

Peter Bruce.

Monday Morning Photo. 4/4/2011.

G'day all, I seem to have my computer problems sorted out. I recieved an interesting email a couple of days or so ago mentioning a mistake in my previous Rockhampton posting which can be found at http://teenagerailfan.blogspot.com. There is a photo there which purports to be at the south end of Rocky yard and it has been pointed out to me that it is nothing of the kind but is the northern end of Mackay yard. I am always grateful for corrections and comments because at this distance in time I cannot rely on my memory. I have to admit too that that photo bears no resemblance to any of my other Rocky pictures.

I then took a look at the other photos in the last posting and realised that the Garratt 1108 was actually passing through Port Curtis Junction heading north into the yard, it has just crossed Port Curtis Road, is that a Golden Fleece servo behind the line up of cars??, and has come in off the Central Line. It looks like from that photo and from Google Earth that there was a triangular layout at Port Curtis Junction and the station and signalbox were just north of the level crossing.

So this week all three photos were taken at the junction.

Both 935 and 1469 are headed south on the mainline and the Port branch can be seen behind both engines, I think the black hatted signalman is returning to the box after issuing the staff to the driver of 1469.

I realise that these musings are of no interest to the non railfans in this group so as I've said to you before, just look at the pictures!!

We took three side trips out of Rocky, to Emerald, Mount Morgan and Yeppoon but I'll cover these later and continue up the North Coast Line next, 202 miles to Mackay on a slow roadside goods train getting put away everywhere for crosses and overtakes.

Thanks again to the Queenslanders for taking the trouble to mail their corrections.

As an aside I was at the Ballarat Tramway Museum a couple of years ago and met an ex-engineman from central Queensland and his wife. He was a volunteer driver at the Mary Valley Railway and the Rocky steam tram and really interesting bloke. Maybe he is reading this now, I know the readership goes way beyond the mailing list.

Best regards to all,

Peter Bruce.

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Monday Evening Photo. 21/02/2011.

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G'day all, back to Rockhampton 1964.... Denison Street after the rain and an anonymous C16 clanks past McConnell's Hotel, "it's friendlier", at least so says the sign above the upstairs verandah, I suppose that's a water gin behind the tender of the C16......maybe not? Any opinions?

The other three photos are all at the other end of the very extensive railway establishment at Rocky, between the end of the yard and Port Curtis Junction. C16 614 is shunting the the south end of the yard, red Beyer-Garratt 1108 is approaching Port Curtis Junction on it's way west and I think 1202 is waiting departure time with a southbound goods while Pb15 520 knocks a few wagons around in a desultory, sub-tropical way. Although Rockhampton wasn't what you would have called a Railway Town, like say Ararat in Victoria or Peterborough in S.A it was a very busy location 24 hours a day and would have employed several hundred railway people altogether. I wonder how many it keeps busy these days!

Rocky was, and of course still is, too big to be just a railway town, it wasn't railway dependant for much of its employment unlike Peterborough and Ararat.

But in 2011 the trains still run along Denison Street. Take a look at Google Earth.

Regards,

Peter Bruce.

P.S. All Queensland steam locos clanked, I think much more so than any others. I remember the sound as being clank-clonk actually. Am I remembering accurately or is my memory playing up again??

Monday Morning Photo. 31/01/2011.

Rockhampton, Queensland. Denison Street.

C16 421 has only progressed a few yards up the street, no metres in 1964, but the rest of the scene is a bit more informative about the railway end of town as it was in so many places back then.

Rockhampton railway station wasn't in the middle of town, it still isn't, and many passengers would have been met by family or friends and whisked away by car or maybe taxi to more salubrious parts of the city.

But in my experience of long distance train travel before the days of universal car ownership many of my fellow sitting up all night passengers were single blokes either travelling to a job or searching for the next one.

And what would such a bloke be looking for when he stepped off the Rocky Mail..........a beer, a feed and the local paper for the job ads and maybe the form guide.

They're all here, next to the station, the aforementioned McConnell's Hotel, the newsagent and the Railway Cafe [prop. A&V Angelos].

I don't think I ever ate at a cafe anywhere on the East Coast that wasn't run by Greeks, three courses for 7/6 plus bread and butter and a pot of tea, 75 cents in today's money. If it was breakfast it was likely a  very generous pile of eggs and bacon and tomatoes and toast.

It would be pretty easy to get misty-eyed about the Good Old Days but they're long gone.... as I've said before, I'm just glad I was there.

Monday Morning Photo. 27/12/2010.

G'day all, I'm listening to the ABC broadcast of the Fourth Test ,Australia v England, and it's pretty depressing, Australia all out for 98, the Poms rampant.

So time to lift the mood a bit with some pictures taken around Rockhampton, Queensland back in late '64. The weather was hot and very humid, it always is late in the year in coastal Queensland. As can be seen from the photos the cloud cover was mostly heavy, in fact sometimes it felt like we were walking around in cloud.

...............Now it's Monday arvo, family Christmas duties intervened before I had time to complete this on Boxing Day.

The cricket news is no better so back to hot and humid Rocky 1964 and a visit to the Loco Depot.

At this time Rockhampton was home to all 30 Beyer Garratts but as can be seen some were already out of use. Of those that were still operational six are present in the photo of the running shed and Pb15 737, a product of Walker's Engineering 1926, is shunting the coal stage. You would be hard put to find a scene like this anywhere in the world today, perhaps on an industrial railway in China, but this is what a working loco depot looked like in steam days, it was busy, dirty, grimey, noisy and above all interesting. It was a monochrome scene on this day with an overcast sky, the Garratts provided the colour, they were Midland Red lined out in Yellow.

I've also included a couple of pictures of the old Rockhampton station, C16 421 has just emerged from the train shed and is in Denison Street passing McConnell's Hotel and it's Ultra-Modern Bottle Store. We didn't sample it's wares but we did try Mac's Rockhampton Beer in the station Refreshment Room, it was truly vile. I think the brand died a deserved death just a few years later.

I've got plenty more Rockhampton photos so there will probably be at least another couple of weeks postings at least.

The next posting will be in 2011.

So all the best to all for the New Year,

Peter Bruce.

Monday Morning Photo. 6/12/2010.

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G'day all, I have had some very helpful feedback from Lynn Zelmer and John Browning about the sugar tramway photos I have posted recently, they have both come to the rescue of my failing memory, although perhaps my memory is not so bad, my knowledge was pretty thin to begin with.

See http://teenagerailfan.blogspot.com for more info and all earlier posts.

Anyway, on with the long, slow trip up the North Coast line. Four shots today and they bring us to Rockhampton, not even half way to Cairns, 396 miles and 11 chains to be exact. For those among us who are only metrically literate [possibly not the right choice of words], a chain is/was 22 yards, the length of a cricket pitch, and us Australians probably don't want to be reminded about cricket pitches at the moment, specifically the one at the Adelaide Oval where our cricket team is getting an absolute belting from England.

Asides aside we travelled from Gympie to Maryborough and Bundaberg to Rockhampton by the preferred mode, very slow goods trains and the intervening stretch Maryborough to Bundaberg was in relative luxury aboard the "Rocky", i.e. Rockhampton Mail. This train was diesel hauled but otherwise basically as it would have been in the '20s and '30s. the Queensland Railways in the early '60s were far from modern, in common with all the government railways in Australia they had been starved of funds for most of their existence and ravaged by the Great Depression and then the massive traffic and minimal maintenance of the second war. In the post-war years there was a huge demand for both catch up money and new money for housing and various infrastructure and our railways mostly just made do. From later in the '60s to the present day the railways in Queensland have benefitted from very large and continuing coal projects and are almost unrecognisable from the primitive organisation shown here.

The photos..... which I never seem to be able to display in the desired order.

848 is supposed to be the first, it is drawing into Gympie from the north and is about to pass a bogie covered wagon which perfectly illustrates the points made above. We arrived in Bundaberg on a Saturday morning and went off up into town for a feed leaving our scanty possessions in the cloak room. Bad mistake, when we got back the station was closed 'til the next day and I had to improvise bedding with the national broadsheet newspaper, "The Australian". This was on the floor of a railmotor trailer on a siding down near the river where it was noticeably cool and damp. Brown Bomber 999 is posing in the station yard for my fellow travellers.

Our accomodation north out of Bundaberg was something that we would have avoided if it had been possible, only the Queensland Government Railways would have a brakevan that had the guard's compartment at one end, a compartment for "drovers accompanying stock" at the other end and accomodation for the said stock in between. We substituted for the drovers and although we weren't actually accompanying stock we did travel with what the stock had left behind!! We met 1032 on a goods somewhere south of Rocky.

The next couple of postings will deal with Rockhampton itself but in the meantime here is 1266 on a northbound Fast Goods, the QGR trying to show that it is as modern as tomorrow.

In every way these were very interesting times in Australia and I was very fortunate to witness them.

Best regards,

Peter Bruce.

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