y. Rail Motors

23rd December 2007

The focus of this gallery is steam, but only the most one eyed devotee could ignore some of the other delights of the railway scene. Chief among these were the rail motors, those trains-in-one-car which the Railways had been playing around with since the 1880’s in a quest for economy on lightly used services. The Victorian Railways were the most determined experimenters, with three different steam and petrol designs operational before the Great War. These included a couple of knife nosed McKeen cars, complete with porthole windows in their steel bodies. The QR bought some McKeens too. But these early experiments were unpromising. The breakthrough came in the Twenties, with the AEC chassis (based on the famous London General bus), coupled with a specially trained group of “Motormen” to drive and maintain them. Steam crews were kept away! Designs rapidly improved, with Brill and Electro Motive Corporation cars being imported by the SAR and VR before the Depression. With huge slow revving six cylinder Winton petrol engines, these must have sounded wonderfully guttural! They were still an aural treat with Detroit diesels. One well known railwayman used to stand on Flinders Street No1 Centre platform every afternoon to watch and listen to the 3.58pm Leongatha depart! In Tasmania, the TGR ran Sentinal steam railmotors into the Fifties, painted silver with red flames! Just another jewel locked beyond my reach across Bass Strait!
I developed a fascination for carriages at an early age, and had an article about the Mann Boudoir cars published in an early ARE magazine while still at school. The incorporation of an engine and driving cab in a carriage was a cert to catch my imagination, and a couple of my teenage drawings are included as proof of the flights of fancy one can make when unencumbered by Economics!
The whole gallery is sprinkled with carriages and railmotors, but this collection is a sampler of what I saw, and sometimes even sought out by the way, in my quest to mark the passing of the steam era.

Jurassic Park	Featherweight	Tin Hare	Motor Train
Improved Tin Hare	Interesting Place for a Boy	Pay Day	Costly Mistake
Overwhelmed	Two Motormen	Spot the Copy	Lots of Vangoods
Easter Monday	A Spark Without Wires	Droning Detroits	Red Hen Sandwich
Glamour Car	One Door Closes	Costly Cost Saving	Treasury Gave the Nod
Fascinating Import	Sojourn in Emptiness	Railmotor Dreaming	Dusk for the Derm