Tuesday, November 18, 2008

 

There's Something About Trains


Yes. there's definitely something fascinating about trains, especially big tough steam trains. Well, here I am sitting on the front of one of the toughest steam trains in Australia. It is a South Australian 400 class Beyer-Garratt engine and it spent its working life hauling huge loads of stuff from the mines at Broken Hill and Leigh Creek down to the smelters and ports in South Australia. Now it is one of the exhibits in the SA Railway Museum at Port Adelaide. Garratts were strange beasts. To get the maximum power out of a steam boiler there were two engines coupled to it, one at each end of the boiler. That made Garratts look a bit different but they could really pull. There were some cases when diesel locos got stuck on frosty tracks on the Sydney-Canberra line and Garratts could unstick the whole train, diesel engine and all the fully-loaded carriages, with no trouble at all. I would love to have been able to drive one of these puffing monsters, but they are all retired now. Do go to railway museums whenever you are near one. Trains are lovely things and museums like the SA one do a magnificent job in preserving old ones for small bears to daydream over.

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