Walhalla Goldfields Railway
| Walhalla Goldfields Railway | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 Locomotive at Thomson station
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| Route length: | 3.2 km | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gauge : | 762 mm ( narrow gauge ) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Walhalla Goldfields Railway is a narrow-gauge museum railway in the Gippsland region , east of Melbourne , Australia . Their track width is 762 mm (2 ft 6 in).
history
The railway was originally, like the Puffing Billy Railway , one of the four experimentally built narrow-gauge railways of the Victorian Railways (VR), which were built at the beginning of the 20th century. It leads from Moe to the gold rush town of Walhalla . The line opened in 1910, but shortly after that in 1914, the city of Walhalla's largest gold mines closed and the city's population fell sharply.
In 1944 operations between Erica and Walhalla were stopped, except for occasional freight traffic to Platina. From 1952, no trains went further than Erica. The whole route from Moe to Erica was discontinued in 1954.
As Walhalla became a popular tourist destination during the second half of the 20th century, there were several attempts to restore part of the railway as a museum railway. These hopes remained unfulfilled until the Walhalla Goldfields Railway was founded in the early 1990s.
First, the Thomson station was rebuilt and the large bridge over the Thomson River renovated. The rails were then relocated to the new Happy Creek stop. Since there were six large trestle bridges between Happy Creek and Walhalla that had to be completely rebuilt, the whole route to Walhalla was not put into operation until ten years later in 2002.
Today trains run between Walhalla and Thomson, a reconstruction of the Thomson – Erica line is currently planned.
Vehicle material
At the time of the Victorian Railways only steam locomotives were used. In the beginning these were exclusively nA class 1'C1 'tank locomotives, but the relatively small nAs couldn't pull heavily loaded trains, and Garratt locomotive G42 was put into service in 1926. All of the surviving locomotives on the Victorian Railways narrow-gauge railways are now with the Puffing Billy Railway and were not available to the Walhalla Goldfields Railway when the Thomson line reopened in 1994.
Two diesel locomotives were purchased from various disused industrial railways in the state of Victoria, which are still in use on almost all trains today. As a future expansion of the railroad would require more powerful locomotives, a larger diesel locomotive was bought and rebuilt from the Emu Bay Railway in 2002 and a fourth diesel locomotive from Queensland Rail in November 2010, which is expected to be rebuilt.
In 2002-06 a smaller steam locomotive was occasionally relocated, the private owner of which loaned the locomotive to the WGR. This locomotive was built by Henschel and Son in Germany in 1956 and served a sugar factory in Thailand. After the sugar factory closed, it and another identical locomotive were bought and taken to Australia. Because the hourly pulling power of this Henschel locomotive was too low, it could only pull profitable trains with the help of one of the diesel locomotives, and it has not been used since 2006, although it is still in the shed at Walhalla station.
In May 2010, on the 100th anniversary of the Moe-Walhalla railway line, an nA 6A locomotive was borrowed from the Puffing Billy Railway and steam locomotive rides were organized.
| number | Surname | image | Axis formula | Construction year | Manufacturer | Further information |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14th | Spirit of Yallourn |
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C-dm | 1951 | John Fowler & Co., Leeds , England | Formerly in operation on the connecting railway that ran between the Yallourn opencast lignite mine and the Morwell lignite opencast mine. Given to WGR 1995. |
| 030 | Kasey |
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B. | 1970 | EM Baldwin & Sons Pty Ltd, Sydney , Australia | Previously worked for the Metropolitan Melbourne Board of Works in the field of sewer tunneling. |
| 1001 | Spirit of Emu Bay |
|
BB-ie | 1963 | Walkers Ltd. , Maryborough , QLD | Formerly on the Emu Bay Railway , Tasmania . |
| DH37 (MMY37) | (not yet named) | BB | 1969 | Walkers Ltd. , Maryborough , QLD | Formerly with Queensland Rail , bought by WGR in 2010. | |
| 103 | Spirit of Baw Baw | C. | 1956 | Henschel and Son , Kassel , Germany | 2002-06 in operation at the WGR, previously at a sugar factory in Thailand. |
