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You are visitor number  to this page, which was last updated at 20020527T152440+10
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NEW! Image Scoring System
As I describe below, these images were originally established for
my own viewing pleasure, and for some time I have had a desktop
scoring system to get an idea of which images stand the test of
time.
From 6 Jan 2001, I have added an image scoring system to allow
you too, kind reader, the opportunity to say which images you
prefer. You will see at the bottom of each thumbnail image a set
of radio buttons, numbered 1 to 5. (See
JohnHurst-1 below for example.) Click one of these to
score any image(s) you wish, on the scale 1 (like the least) to 5
(like the most). Then click the tick to register your score. You
can score as often as you like (!) for as many as you like.
From time to time I will publish the "Hall of Fame" with
progressive voting scores.
I do have an ultimate purpose in mind: images that are unpopular
will be removed to make room for additional ones. I recently had
to argue a case for my quota to be increased, which was successful: but this clearly
cannot continue, even though I have more images to add. So some
will have to go. But they won't go far away! The thumbnails will
remain, but the larger images will be archived, so that if at any
time these images become more popular, they will be reinstated.
So start scoring your favorite images!
has been moved to a separate page.
Welcome to John Hurst's Railway Photograph Catalogue!
G'day. This site started out as a way of cataloging my numerous
railway pictures, which I first starting building up as a set of
root window backgrounds. That was back in 1992, before the
web. But once I became aware of the web (in 1994), I realised that
a web page would not only allow me to peruse my catalog easily,
but might also prove useful to others.
This site first went on-line in early 1995, and I claim it was one
of the first railway web pages! Unfortunately, I can't
substantiate any dates, and web pages tend to be rather ephemeral,
so you'll just have to take my word for all that.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy these pages. Over 200 people have written
to me to say they have enjoyed them, and you are
welcome to swell that
number!
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- Image : JohnHurst-1, 96835 bytes, 800x600 pixels
- Date : 21 Apr 2000, catalogued 14 May 2000
- Photographer : Barbara Hurst
- Medium : colour print, print number ajh-train-spotter
- Description : Hello. This is me. I'm not sure why I'm including
this picture of me, but my wife likes it. Taken on the broad gauge
steam train returning from Wodonga, Easter 2000.
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The catalog is restricted to photographs where either I own the
copyright, or permission has been given to include photographs
here. Permission is given to copy any these images for personal
or research use, but not for commercial gain or profit without
written permission from me or the original copyright owner. I
would appreciate hearing
how you find these images useful.
1. Catalogue Overview
This page describes the extensive collection of railway images
maintained at Computer
Science, Monash
University. For my other reciprocal railway links,
see my Railway Links Page (still
being updated). If you have a railway page, and you'd like to swap
links with me, just drop
me an email note, and I'll add you in!
The numbering scheme used for the images themselves is relatively
straightforward, and provides the basis for referencing all images
and their descriptions. Where there is only one locomotive in the
scene, its class/road number is used as the title. Multiple
images of the same loco are reflected in a "-1", "-2", etc.,
suffix.
Where there is more than one locomotive in the scene, and the
locomotives are coupled together, the road numbers are appended in
the form "leading+trailing+.." as appropriate, again with a "-1"
suffix to distinguish multiple images. If the locomotives are on
separate tracks, the notation "loco=loco-1" is used. Multiple
parallel running, with multiple coupled locos is handled by
"loco+loco=loco-1" and so on.
Occasionally, where many locomotives appear in a scene, only the
main ones may be identified (such as at roundhouses, etc.).
Please mail
ajh@cs.monash.edu.au if
you enjoyed this archive, or if you have any comments or
complaints!
2. Catalogue Details
2.1. TODOs
- 20000402:180232
- Write a search engine. (done: some idiosyncracies in the main csse cgi environment prevent this working at the moment. I'm working on it!)
- 20000402:180254
- Write a "rate the picture"
script.
2.2. How the Catalogue is Built
In an ongoing project like this, managing the large amount of
information that is continually changing can rapidly become
intractable. Hence I recognized quite early on that some sort of
management system was imperative. Here are the various approaches
that have been used:
- Building all pages in HTML, and editing the raw HTML. A
consistent look and feel was established by cutting and
pasting templates. Needless to say, this approach was quickly
superceded!
- Defining each page as a literate program, using macro
processing facilities within the literate programming tools to
ensure a consistent look and feel.
- Defining each page as a literate program, but generating m4
files for handling the macro expansion. This complicated the
generation process, but provided more powerful macro tools.
- Moving the literate programming process from a TeX based
system (nutweb) to an XML based system (XLP/
AXE). (I should have links to these!)
- The current system is much simpler, and is described
below.
2.3. The Current System
Each image has its own description XML file. The main pages are
defined as XML documents called index.xml that "include"
the description files. The whole shebang is then translated
directly to the corresponding HTML page using the
AXE program. The shunting yards, or navigation
bars at the head of each page are generated by a series of
separate xml scripts, such as
Central.xml.
There are two translation files associated with this process. The
main one,
TrainPage.html , defines the translations from XML
to HTML for each train page in the system (the index.xml files).
The second one,
TrainShunt.html, defines the translations to build
the shunting yards.
Given any image reference (e.g., Gerogery-1) and its
directory (e.g., misc), all the information required to
present this image can be constructed from them, viz.:
- Full Image
- ./misc/Gerogery-1.jpg
- Thumbnail Image
- ./misc/thumb/Gerogery-1.gif
- Description
- ./misc/Gerogery-1.xml
3. Detailed Index
A taxonomy of railway subjects is not straightforward. I have taken
the approach of cataloguing by attribute of ownership, although the
epoch is not necessarily consistent. Thus for example,
Puffing Billy has a separate
section, although most of the stock was originally built by the
Victorian Railways. Visits by
rolling stock to other systems further confuse this, especially
where multiple items of different ownership are involved.
Hopefully no one will be too confused by the approach taken. Of
course, the author will happily entertain any
debate upon the
subject!
3.1. Australian Government Railways
The Commonwealth Railways were formed as part of the Federal
Government's "buy-off" of Western Australia, as an inducement to
enter federation in 1905. Of course, political promises being
what they are, it took a while before the railway system actually
came into being, and the CR was established by an Act of
Parliament in 1911. The Commonwealth Railways had the
responsibility of running the trans-continental line from Port
Augusta in South Australia to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia
(opened in 1917), and then subsequently, the Central Australia
Railway (Port Pirie to Alice Springs) and the North Australia
Railway (Darwin to Birdum) when they opened.
In 1974, the Whitlam Government offered to take over the railway
systems of each state. For political reasons, only the South
Australian and Tasmanian Governments took up the offer, and the
Australian National Railways were born from the conjunction of the
Commonwealth, South Australian and Tasmanian Railway systems.
From inception, a system that controlled only two non-adjacent
states was bound to suffer the same difficulties as any other
separate system, and so very little of substance changed.
Australian Railways, let alone "National" ones, have always
suffered from political interference. Here was the chance to move
the fragmented, isolated and largely decoupled railway systems
forward, and most state governments could not see beyond their
parochial interests. This railway system goes into the category
of "what might have been ..."
The ANR pages now include all the material previously filed under
CR, and also all diesels previously classified under SA.
NSWGR locomotives are classified by a 1924 convention, in
which the number of driving wheels is given as the first letter (C =
6-coupled, D = 8-coupled), and the class is given as the leading two
digits of the road number. All road numbers were four digits, and
where the class number more than 99 locomotives, the road number
carries into the second digit. However, the locomotive still belongs
to the base class. Thus 5469 is a "D53" class, and is engine
number 169 of that class.
In practice, the letter prefix was dropped. Many classes were
still commonly referred to by their pre-1924 classification, so that,
for example, the 32 class were often called "P" class.
There are several indiosyncracies to this system. For
example, the Garratts (AD60) class had an additional "A" to
indicate that they were Articulated.
This part of the photo collection is the most extensive, mainly because I
lived in Sydney during the years 1970 to 1973, and travelled on many
of the last steam runs while steam was still in revenue service on the
NSWGR.
The Queensland section is
thin, since I have not lived or travelled much within the
state. However, there are a few relevant photos, and as I gather
more material, this section will expand.
Check out the
Queensland Railway Locomotives page for more information.
When I was a lad (I served a
term) in the late 50s, I used to catch a local Bridgewater
passenger (usually an Rx, but occasionally a 620) up to Mount
Lofty, and spend many happy hours dodging around the railway
station with my little black and white camera, snapping 500s,
520s, 700s, 710s, 720s (never saw a 600 though). Alas, Alak, all
those photos disappeared in some major cleanout.
(I suspected my mother, but she says she never threw any photos
out!) I console myself with the fact that the viewfinder on
that little camera was not much chop, or rather, was too much
chop, and frequently what I thought I was taking was never quite
what appeared on the emulsion. Still, would have been nice to
see them now. (:-(
What is in this section are a few photos of preserved steam, and
the occasional diesel (shock, horror), taken through the 70s and
80s.
Just a few M/MA class, and one or two Abt, in this group. I
never really got to see any Tasmanian steam, at least to
photograph. One of my earliest memories, however, was of a visit to
the Apple Isle during the early 50s. I was perhaps 5 years old at the
time. I vividly remember seeing a Tasmanian steam loco on these
incredibly narrow tracks (I was brought up in Victoria and its
5'3" gauge, don't forget), running light engine, tender
first. It was perhaps an M class, although it was quite dirty and not
at all like the following photographs. It is reported that I exclaimed
excitedly "train going backsa"!
I now reside in Victoria, so this section is likely to see the
most recent pictures of railway action. While I grew up in
Victoria, I left the state when I was 10, and didn't have a camera
at that time. We lived just 100 yards (pre metric) from a level
crossing on the Lilydale line, which then saw goods travelling to
Healesville and Warburton, so there were often K and J classes
puffing past (often at hours past a boy's bedtime!) I also
remember locos like the X and C classes seen at the more important
depots, but unfortunately never got any piccies of them in action
(or otherwise).
The Victorian Railways use a letter classification, with
locomotives being identified by their class letter and road
number. Minor modifications to a class resulted in suffixes, such
as the D3 class derived from the D class. Because they have
recycled class numbers from the steam to diesel era, this catalog
is split into steam and diesel subsections, although these are not
directly labelled as such.
3.2. Railways outside Australia
Phew! There's an awful lot of photos here for an Australian
Railway site! You may well ask what a collection of British Railways
locomotives is doing in an Australian Collection! This all
started in 1988 when 4472, "Flying Scotsman" visited this country
for the Bicentennial Celebrations. I took many photographs of
4472 in conjunction with her Oz cousins, and subsequently the
collection has been augmented by photos I had taken myself on
various visits to the UK. I have spent three sabbaticals
in the UK, twice with my family, when we made a point of travelling
out and around almost every weekend to see what we could see. And
Britain being (and I mean this most politely) quite train-mad,
there's preserved railways everywhere you turn. Perhaps not so
much in Scotland (they were always a somewhat more phlegmatic lot
than those south of the border), but even there they are catching
up!
The main and varied preservation sites in the UK make it
difficult to be too strict on classifying and cataloguing these
images. I've tried to put things in their "obvious" place, but I
may still have made the occasional mistake.
Write to me with
any comments you may have on the organisation.
I haven't done much serious rail travel in europe, so this
section is a little sketchy.
On a few short trips to New Zealand for conferences and the
like, I was able to capture a little of New Zealand Railway
scenes. Of course, the country is much more reknown for its
natural scenery, but sometimes you can combine both!
A motley collection of some images taken by me on a couple of
stopovers enroute to the UK, together with some images sent to me by
email correspondents.
The navigation bar at the top got too large, and so I've relegated
the rest of the world stuff to this separate page.
3.3. Miscellaneous Railway Subjects
Some odds and sods, not elsewhere classified. Derailments figure
prominently here, as well as Tramways (street cars in
YankSpeak).
This page is of note because it was the first train page generated
from XML definition files.
This directory contains miscellaneous private railway systems
around Australia (and no, I haven't been to the Pilbaras to see
Pendennis Castle). The major system amongst those that
are collected here is the South Maitland Railways, a
once-extensive coalfields system near Newcastle.
Puffing Billy
(not his real name) must be the most well
known steam railway in Australia. Distinguished by being the
first railway preservation effort in Australia, the railway has
grown from humble volunteer beginnings in the late 1950s to become
a fully operational and professional railway system. Although it
still relies heavily upon volunteer labour, there is a dedicated
professional staff of about 30 full time employees who oversee the
daily running (except Christmas Day),
including trains that now run all the way to the recently (Oct
1998) restored terminus at Gembrook.
The Belgrave to Gembrook line is the sole (original) survivor of a
number of narrow-gauge (762mm or 2ft6in) built by the Victorian
Railways from the 1890s as "pioneering" branch lines. The narrow
gauge lines were Wangaratta to Whitfield (1899), Upper Ferntree
Gully (UFTG) to Gembrook (1900), Colac to Beech Forest/Crowes
(1902/1911), and Moe to Walhalla (1910). The latter line has been
relaid from Thompson River to Walhalla, and it is planned to run
tourist trains over it in the near future.
The lines were all closed in the 1950s, except Colac to Crowes,
which hung on until 1962. The UFTG-Gembrook line was closed in
1952 by a landslide at Selby, and for a while, some excursion
trains were run between UFTG and Belgrave until that section was
closed for gauge broadening and electrification in 1958.
A group of enthusiasts worked hard to reopen the line, and in 1962,
permission was obtained to run from Belgrave to Menzies Creek,
rerouting around the landslide with the aid of some sharp curves
and army assistance. Since then, the line has been gradually
reopened to Emerald (1971?), Lakeside (1978?) and recently,
Gembrook (1998).
During a period while I was a volunteer at the Emerald Carshops, I
occasionally took my camera along to capture some steam action
going past. Many of these photos come from around Emerald, but
there are a few others.
Bill Russell has a series of pages on the
Victorian Government Narrow Gauge Railways that gives
additional information on Puffing Billy and related railways systems
in Victoria.
This page and its images are copyright, A.J.Hurst 2000
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