Just been trawling through a few photos instead of working, and came upon these long-forgotten ones. I have been trying to repress the memory of this first one for four decades... I stayed with one of my non-train loving cousins instead of following Dad down to Bathurst railway station. He, and my sister and another cousin, cadged a ride up Raglan Bank in a 47 class banker. Here is a shot looking back at 4537 and the train.
I got the consolation prize - the next day in the same general vicinity we scored the Indian Pacific with 4485 and a sister 44. Pretty sure I have posted a version of this slide before but, hey, its double Alcos...
The other end of the train was nearly as interesting, and certainly much cleaner than the front end.
Anyway, i had been looking for photos of a little place called Dripstone, which was the station where Arthur Edward Jones had been sent in 1925. Arthur is one-eighth of the reason why I am here today - he was my paternal great grand-father. He was the station master at Dripstone between 1925 and 1927. Fifty years later, both the station building and the station master's house were standing. We only took a solitary shot of each.
The station is now gone, but the house (or a bit of it) lives on in a remodelled dwelling on the same site. Of course, Arthur is gone too and I am going to leave you with a report of his leaving of Dripstone - from the Wellington Times in April 1927. Seems he was bit of a 'live wire'.
Cheers,
Don
On 29 August 1968, 3501 made what I think was its last trip to the Illawarra. Here's three shots of this tour.
The first has 01 on the down platform road at Wollongong. See if you can spot Wally...
Yep, some hoon is photobombing from the end window of what I suspect is a HFL?
The next two shot is from a photostop at the Inner Harbour. Do this these days and you'll be either run over by quad 82s or arrested for breaching national security. Or both.
Number 3 shot is the loco shooting back through Mount St Thomas, which suggests the photographer was too slow to the location to get a front-on shot, or it got mucked up somehow.
Cheers!
Don
In 1978 I was an accomplished photographer, or so I thought. I was also a teenager and so I couldn't be told anything. Or maybe I just didn't understand the complexities offset viewfinders... anyway, that situation explains the following shots.
We had been advised that the rolling stock for the workers trains was to be 'upgraded', which we took to mean that the pre-WWII carriages were to be withdrawn. We had managed to basically get no photos of their predecessors (the FO sets) prior to their withdrawal earlier that decade so we weren't going to be caught out again. This time we grabbed the trusty Agfa instamatic and headed down to North Wollongong station one sunny afternoon.
Norff Gong (as pronounced by those in the know) is best for up trains in the afternoon, and I think I may have already posted this first one of 4825 previously. It hints at what is to come - as the loco just squeezes into the left of the frame (buffers don't count).
Down trains were a bit tricky as they would burst out from under the road bridge adjacent to the Mount Pleasant Signal Box at full speed, and really only hit their anchors on the final approach to the platform. We weren't so hung up about SPADs in the 70s. This meant a bit of a scramble out of the Datsun 180B if you weren't paying attention. But one of us was paying attention when 4870 cruised into town.
As film was expensive, this was the last of the down trains photographed that afternoon. We also seemed reluctant to photograph anything other than 48s on workers trains - goodness knows what pearls we let slip by.
Anyway, back to offset viewfinders. The following shots aren's entirely attributable to Agfa's design department. I had been warned, but I had also been told to get close in on the train as we wanted shots of the carriages. Well, as 4892, 4856 and 4828 worked their trains though, I snapped away... 90% of a train is still a train? Here they are for posterity.
So, you can bet there was a bit of an inquest when this roll of film came back from the developers. I still wince when I see them, 40 years later.
And if it was bad enough, we did hang around for one last shot. We were hoping for five railmotors headed to Waterfall. Instead we got three - or rather, 2.9.
Thanks for hanging around, too. Will return with some of the Senor Train Hunter's blurred shots in my next post, as we work hard to maintain low publishing standards.
Cheers,
Don
