Sunday 4 March 2012

Monday Morning Photo. 05/03/2012.


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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