In the presentation ‘National Rail - The Early Years’ we covered ‘why’ and ‘how’ National Rail Corporation (NR) was formed, ‘why’ because the industrialised states and the federal government wanted to improve the efficiency of interstate rail links whilst the ‘how’ as we saw involved leasing/transferring many different locomotive classes ( AN, BL, C, DL, EL, 442, 80, 81, 82) and rolling stock in the early to mid 1990s until NR received its own equipment.
Initially set up in 1992 to handle only interstate operations, in 1998 NR was permitted to bid for intrastate work and in 1999 it gained contracts with Boral for the haulage of blue metal stone traffic between Marulan and Port Kembla. As we saw in ‘National Rail - The Early Years’ it used refurbished second hand Queensland Railways coal wagons for the former and ex-BHP coal wagons for the latter until newer stock was purchased as we shall see in this presentation. We shall also see its foray into coal haulage for Macquarie Power.
In 2002, NR was merged with the New South Wales government owned Freight Corp and sold to a consortium of Patrick Corporation and Toll Holdings and subsequently rebranded as Pacific National. It took the next 15 years to ultimately see the bulk of the PacNat fleet running in a common livery.
This presentation will slightly overlap ‘National Rail - The Early Years’ and covers the period 1998-2003.
Approximate run time: 92 minutes.