Coffs Harbour is typical of many of the larger cities and towns situated on the North Coast (Railway) Line.
Up until the late 1990s, because of the poor roads and infrastructure, Coffs Harbour and other ‘rainway towns’ were highly dependent on the railways for conveyance of both passenger and freight traffic. With the improvement in road and air transport and, faced with fierce competition, the railways are retreating into that niche of the transportation market that they are best suited to, namely hauling bulk commodities such as coal, grain, cement, fuel etc and long distance haulage of containerised freight. Sadly this has caused the demise of the railway general freight business and Coffs Harbour is a typical example where goods sidings have been closed and through running is the order of the day.
This video is composed of two parts. Part 1 deals with Coffs Harbour as it was in 1992, with a large (but nonetheless threatened) goods yard handling specialised and general freight categories, exposed to both interstate express and local pick-up freight services, and of course accustomed to a range of Goodwin-Alco locomotives and the XPT. Part 2 deals with Coffs Harbour as it is today in 2002, a through single main line seeing both XPTs and enormous Pacific NAtional superfreighters (the latter hauled by much more powerful Goninan-GE locomotives) pass by an upgraded Coffs Harbour railway station and the empty grass paddock nearby that once was Coffs Harbour goods yard.
Locomotives seen in action in this video include 44, 45, 442, 80, NR, X (shunting tractor) Class and the XPTs.
Approximate run time: 64 minutes.