Model Trains and Things

Back on February 21 I took a run over to Maryborough to have a look at what was out in the open at the EDI/Walkers plant and there I found 8306.

Pacific National will be moving into the Queensland coal transport market … perhaps as soon as the last quarter of this year … and they’re having two classes of electric locomotives built to handle that traffic. Once class is being built in Germany and the 83 class is being built at the EDI plant in Maryborough – the same place that built the PN class diesels for Pacific National.

This photo was taken from a public street … that’s where most of the EDI products receive their finishing touches.

From the EDI plant I headed over to Maryborough West and found two more EDI/Walkers products in the yard there.

The loco nearest the camera is 3532 a rebuild of one of the original classes of electric loco that QR had built when they introduced electrification to the north coast line. 3532 was waiting to head north where it will spend its working life hauling coal trains.

Behind the 35 class is Pacific National’s 8304 and off to the left is a the Maryborough West shunter – a 1720 class that was so decrepit looking that you couldn’t read it’s number from either side or from either end.

About every three months Toni and I have to go to Rockhampton so we drive up and back along the Bruce Highwayand. tThe best part of the trip would have to be the section north of Mount Larcombe right through to Rockhampton because that’s where the Bruce Highway parallels the main north coast railway line.

That’s also the section that was subject to duplication work a few years back so that it could cope with the large number of coal trains coming in from the west and heading down to Gladstone to unload. Queensland Rail runs some very long coal trains along this section and you will nearly always see two locos on the front of the train and one or two locos cut in at about the halfway point in the train.

It’s quite an impressive site to see one of these fully laden coal trains thundering along and I was surprised to read today that Queensland Rail limits the speed of these coal trains to 80km/h. It was surprising because we sure weren’t doing 80km/h when we were trying to keep up with this fully laden train on the last trip