A lok back by our friend of the railways, Nicholas Pusenjak Back on the rails and our transparency for this week was taken in the summer of 1975 – when if I recall correctly we had a trial of Daylight Savings and this gave me an opportunity to finish work and get to Fremantle with lots of good sunshine time left for photography. K 204 is coupled with a J class locomotive and is hauling a short train from Leighton or North Fremantle towards Fremantle and Robb Jetty. The nine K class were the Western Australian Government Railways first standard gauge mainline locomotives and were initially used on hauling iron ore trains from Koolyanobbing to Kwinana with up to four locomotives working in multiple unit. They were built by the English-Electric Company at their plant in Rocklea, a suburb of Brisbane and entered service in 1966. They were delivered to Western Australia by rail. Numbered K 201 to K 209, they were identical to three locomotives bought by Goldsworthy Mining for their iron ore railway in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Goldsworthy Mining wrote off a locomotive due to accident damage in 1968 and the WAGR made K 202 available to them, and Goldsworthy ordered a replacement for the WAGR which became K 210. They are powered by English-Electric’s 12CVST diesel engine which developed 1,950 horsepower. They are mechanically similar to the English-Electric Type 3 (Class 37) locomotives of British Railways and like their counterparts in the United Kingdom were a versatile locomotive. They were used on all sorts of trains ranging from heavy hauls of bulk commodities, the express passenger “Indian Pacific” and “Trans” trains, general goods and infrastructure maintenance. Four are believed to be operational, with two scrapped and the remainder stored. K 204 was one a handful to have been scrapped. It suffered accident damage at West Merredin in the 1990’s and was written off. Back to our scene, the train is finished off with a brake (or guard’s van) and it has been many years since goods trains have carried guards. These tracks also carry the suburban narrow gauge railway line to Fremantle and are now electrified. The attractive two-tone blue livery of the WAGR was introduced for their standard gauge diesel locomotives and was later replaced with a corporate orange and blue colour scheme when the Westrail branding was introduced. The second locomotive is a J class, a 600 horsepower unit built by Clyde GM at Granville in New South Wales. It would have been towed in this picture, or could have its own crew as the English-Electric and General Motors locomotives were not compatible for operation in multiple unit. Richard Rigg sent in the second photo of K205 with I guess a load of wheat in the Avon Valley .
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 11:07:13 +0000
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