by John Wells
Recently this column told of the duplication of the Gippsland railway as far as Morwell, but the electrification also was vitally important. It will be interesting to see what motive power our trains are using in another decade or so, and whether electricity of one kind or another will power trains in Gippsland. Who knows?
The Gippsland line was the only non-suburban line to be electrified, and now that infrastructure has been removed. Diesel has replaced electricity but diesel is not going to be sustainable for very long. We'll see.
There had been an expectation in Gippsland that the line would be electrified as electricity generation in the Valley increased. The Gippsland Times of 27 March 1944 reported on a letter from N.C. Harris, Chairman of Victorian Railways. He said that the Gippsland line would need much greater traffic volumes to justify the vast cost, and the Geelong line would probably be given priority anyway, because it had more traffic.
He did offer the consolation that VR was experimenting with pulverised coal as fuel and that if the experiment worked out the Gippsland line steam locomotives would be given priority. Only four years later work on the electrification was begun.
Background planning had begun in 1944 when the Victorian Railways embarked upon Operation Phoenix, to underpin industrial growth with a much better rail service. During the 1930s the Great Depression had led to things getting run-down, including track and rolling stock. During the war resources for maintenance and development were limited but the demand for rail transport was much greater. The budget for Operation Phoenix was a staggering eighty million pounds, and it included upgrading the Gippsland line, some duplication and electrification as far as Traralgon. It was a big, bold project, and it worked.
On 1 December 1952 there was a trial of diesel power when locomotive B60 hauled a train through the Bairnsdale. Until then the line was operate with steam engines and "the railways" were desperate to speed up the delivery of briquettes down the line. The train was of eight empty coaches and a guards van – and, passing through Morwell it was already running half an hour late.
Ironically. The line that helped power the state with electricity was to return to diesels much later.
In 1953 the line was electrified as far as Traralgon to cater for the increased traffic brought about by the briquette production and the increased industrialisation of the La Trobe Valley. On 21 April 1953 the first electric train rolled into the Traralgon Station. I'm interested in and suspicious of that date. The overhead wires were supported by steel stanchions, and for much of the line they had to be wide enough to accommodate the line duplication, but they could not be put up before the duplication. I think that for 1953 we need to read 1954 and for 21 April we need to read 21 July.
L-1150, named R.G. Wishart after a VR Commissioner, pulled a train through to Traralgon, its front adorned with flags. People gathered along the line, in paddocks and on stations, to see history being made. The Argus of July 22, 1954 reported on the arrival of the first electric train into Warragul the day before. A crowd of more than 3000 gathered at Warragul, boosted by 1200 school children, indicated the sense of history being made.
There were 61 miles of the Gippsland track electrified at that point. That work had begun in September 1948. Now Warragul was told it could expect 20 trains a day each way. That was true enough but many of them were goods trains carrying briquettes.
We badly needed locomotives that could move those briquettes quickly and the L class could haul up to 1100 tons at a time, and haul them at up to 70 miles an hour. Fortunately they were also fitted with the best locomotive brake systems available in the world at the time. Their ability to accelerate and decelerate quickly made it easier for them the fit between the suburban trains when they passed through Dandenong toward the big smoke.
We got our first L-class locomotive in January 1953 and the twenty-fourth and last came here on 3 August 1954. They were intended for the Gippsland line alone. The last of them was removed from service in 1987
The overhead wires carried 15000-volts of direct current. In the 1950s that was a significant total, reminding us all the Victoria, the SEC and VR, led the world in the long-distance transmission of electricity. The L-class locos had two pantographs but usually ran with only one raised. Frosty mornings created a problem with condensation freezing on the wires.
Like those enginemen who poured sand on the tracks the new crews learned a new technique. They began to use both pantographs on frosty mornings, with the leading one scraping off the ice and the trailing one collecting the current.
There were 19 substations built between Nar Nar Goon and Traralgon in the three years of 1952-54. This was part of the first-ever electrification of a main railway line in Australia, and it worked brilliantly. These substations were ugly brick buildings but one has been preserved at Bunyip to remind us of that bold plan to electrify a country line.
In 1987 the electrification from Warragul to Traralgon was turned off. Suburban trains ran the passenger service from Warragul, always seeming a little incongruous. This was the year the L-class were sacked and most of them were scrapped.
In 1998 the electric overhead lines between Warragul and Bunyip were switched off and in 2001 Pakenham became the end of the electrified line. During these last few years the overhead lines and the stanchions that supported them were steadily removed. That was a massive task. One small section near Bunyip was kept for heritage purposes and the adjacent substation was also kept.
L-1150 opened electrification of the line in 1954 and it was given the honour of pulling the last country passenger train in Victoria to be hauled by an electric locomotive. That was on 13 June 1987, and it was the end of an era.
It is a little hard to understand the economics. The L-class had years of life ahead of them.
Yes, the electricity came from coal and was environmentally bad, but replacing them with diesel locomotives was hardly a step forward.