Duplication of the Gippsland line

by John Wells
The railway climbs a kilometre or so east of the Longwarry station and this rise is known as the Longwarry Bank. In the fifties we often saw locomotives reverse back to Longwarry and split their train in two, taking one half at a time up the slope and joining the two parts together again in the Drouin yards. 
That cannot have helped meet the timetables. We sometimes saw locomotives dropping sand on the track to get traction.
This usually happened on very frosty mornings, rather than in the rain.
We also woke up one morning in 1952 (I think it was) to find that our railway line fence had been cut and that a bulldozer was making a large hole in a bottom paddock next to the line. We had not expected this and Dad was close to boiling point when he managed to contact the boss of that section. A notice had not been delivered to us. It didn’t matter, because on September 7,1948 the Government gazetted the Gippsland Railway Duplication (etc) Act and that Act gave the Victorian Railways Commissioners some sweeping powers.
The Commissioners were empowered to build the duplicating line in “such location as they may determine in order to obtain suitable gradients but so that no part of the duplicating line is distant more than two miles from the nearest part of the existing railway” and “the Commissioners…without…having the consent of the owner or occupier to enter into and upon any land… The Commissioners may close, divert, take and use any road or portion of a road… the Commissioners… shall do as little damage as may be.” 
It was a powerful brief. The landowners along the line were compensated for any land taken, but the Victorian Railways Commissioners decided the amount.
It was clear that a single line could not handle the greatly increased traffic brought about by post war industrial growth, in the metropolitan area and in the Latrobe Valley and, importantly, the need for hundreds of tons of briquettes to be brought down every day for the factories and homes in Melbourne and the suburbs.
If a line is not duplicated trains can only ‘cross’ where there is a passing loop, and in this case that meant one train waiting on a siding while the other train went past. It was slow and cumbersome.
The duplication was underway. The piece of our farm that became “the big waterhole” provided fill to help bring the duplication up the Longwarry Bank. It also provided a swimming hole in summer though the water carried so much colloidal clay that it was completely opaque. Somehow the eels found it and bred up nicely. We ate a great many of those eels, but the ones from the big waterhole always tasted a little muddy. The eels in the Tarago tasted much better – which has nothing at all to do with this story.
The section between Dandenong and Narre Warren had been duplicated by 8November 8, 1956. The Victorian Railways again carried out the job in parts, as they had with the building of the first line. Still, the work had a high priority, obviously enough, but in researching this I became puzzled by the information that the Narre Warren to Berwick section was not duplicated until February 1962. There were difficulties on some sections where getting a good base was not easy, and there was much swampy ground along the route near Narre Warren, but I’m not sure that would explain a six-year delay.
The piecemeal approach meant the Berwick-Officer section was completed on May 13, 1956 and the Officer-Pakenham section was completed on February 27, 1955, the year before. The Pakenham – Nar Nar Goon section was completed even earlier, finished on October 10, 1954. The Nar Nar Goon to Tynong section was duplicated by June 28, 1953 and the Tynong to Bunyip section was finished on 19 August 19, 956, Duplication to Warragul was completed by the end of 1956, yet the Warragul to Yarragon section was duplicated in 1952. 
Those dates provide more questions than answers. It is difficult to get any confirmation.
The section between Bunyip and Longwarry was never duplicated. It is said that it was not possible to establish a good footing for the new bridge, but this has been questioned by smarter men than me. That section was operated with a ‘staff’ system, where the driver could only enter the section if he had a ‘staff’, 
The staff was actually a cane circle; the driver would lean from the cabin of the loco and the Station Master would hand it to him, or loop it over his outstretched arm. If the train was not stopping at Longwarry or Bunyip the drivers would only slow enough to make sure they got the staff – if they missed it they had to stop the train and reverse.
When The Gippslander or the Sale Express came through Longwarry they would not even slow because a heavy metal ring was the staff and this was hung from a post and picked up by an arm poked out from the locomotive for that purpose. It was a very precise business.
The “Gippslander” first ran in 1954 to celebrate the electrification of the line. It had an air-conditioned buffet car and it had two or three streamlined coaches painted blue with two yellow lines along above and below the windows. It seemed terribly glamorous at the time. 
An L-class would pull it to Traralgon, where the electrification ended, then an R-class steam loco would haul it to Sale and a smaller J-class would complete the trip to Bairnsdale. Later, when the wires came down, it was hauled by various diesel locomotives.
The duplication continued as far as Morwell. It was felt that the economic return on duplicating the track beyond the briquetting plant was not sufficient. The duplication reached Morwell in 1954, but there was at least one gap, between Bunyip and Longwarry, and that gap exists today.
In Longwarry about two months ago I saw that there was only one line running toward Drouin from Longwarry, so some of the duplication has actually been removed.
Under Victoria’s Big Build there was, and still is, a plan to greatly upgrade the Gippsland line. That was to include duplication east of Moe toward Morwell (so there was a gap to be filled there) and duplicating the line from Morwell to Traralgon and duplicating the track between Longwarry and Bunyip, instead of which the single-track section has been extended.
In 2022 The Gazette reported that the Longwarry-Bunyip duplication was not going ahead after all. Extra track at both ends would provide passing loops instead, a much less effective system – but cheaper to build. There are new platforms being built to provide passenger access to trains each way in the duplicated sections at the stations.