South Maitland Railways documentary.

A short documentary on the steam operations of the South Maitland Railways in NSW.

https://youtu.be/ADGIqWH3fdg

Nice find . thank for posting

Matt

Thanks for sharing John!

The SMR was a fascinating operation, being the last regular operator of steam in Australia, ending steam operations in 1983! And for the most part running unbraked coal hoppers, until the last few years when the brake bogie hoppers from the government railways became the norm.

I honestly love the look of the SMR 10 class 2-8-2Ts (what I've taken to calling Steam Bricks!) as well. Very brutish looking locos, and amazingly the entire class still exists!

Regards

Thank you John! Great to see some locos I had not seen before, especially to see them in color in their natural running! Plus all the history that goes into that video. Great stuff!

An excellent video, thank you sharing the link John.

I'm glad you all found this as fascinating as I did. I'm glad there has been some preservation of the lines. Is this still ongoing, or is this one of those things that ends up mothballed?

I agree Zec, those engines are like bricks and very much British in appearances too and I really like those old coal hoppers. Imagine seeing this in operation too only a short time ago.

JCitron said:

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I agree Zec, those engines are like bricks and very much British in appearances too and I really like those old coal hoppers. Imagine seeing this in operation too only a short time ago.

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I wondered why those locos needed all that water when they had a small coal bunker. Those coal hoppers are very cute. After watching them being unloaded into a freighter, it occurred to me that Ben would have liked to model that operation. It's typical of coaling operations that appealed to him.

The area around Maitland and Cessnock is nice country and there are lots of wineries in the foothills. My wife and I spent a few days in that area a couple of years ago.

pcas1986 said:

I wondered why those locos needed all that water when they had a small coal bunker. Those coal hoppers are very cute. After watching them being unloaded into a freighter, it occurred to me that Ben would have liked to model that operation. It's typical of coaling operations that appealed to him.

The area around Maitland and Cessnock is nice country and there are lots of wineries in the foothills. My wife and I spent a few days in that area a couple of years ago.

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I agree Ben would have loved these things.

I've been through the area via one Daniel Shaw's severe weather storm chases he livestreamed. We passed by a closed colliery - there were fences all around the area and he mentioned something about the operation, but I didn't connect anything to it until now.

The wineries remind me of what happened to the Lehigh Valley and that region in eastern Pennsylvania. The old anthracite operations have long passed except for a few minor operations dedicated to specialty coal and not enough for long trains of coal hoppers.