Up until 1992, the Victorian government operated all aspects of passenger and freight rail operations in the state of Victoria. The railway operated under the banner of VR, with its blue and yellow livery.
About this time privatisation of the system occurred and VLine, after dabbling with state and interstate freight (before these commodities moved to Freight Victoria, then Freight Australia and finally Pacific National), picked up the regional country passenger services, using A (re-engined B), N, P and Y Class diesel electric locomotive, all of the ClydeGM stable, and self propelled Sprinter and Velocity passenger sets. I suspect as more Velocity car sets are added, we will see the demunition, if not complete elimination, of locomotive hauled passenger rolling stock. Already A Class have been mothballed, the P Class used on push-pull operation reduced in numbers and a limited number of Y Class have been kept for shunting activities. The only interstate operation is confined to Great Southern’s Overland (to Adelaide) hauled by PacNat locomotives and the CountryLink XPT services (to Sydney).
In this presentation we will focus on locomotive hauled passenger trains at Melbourne’s Southern Cross railway station (formerly Spencer St railway station) and then follow such trains up as far as Albury on the North East corridor.
Approximate run time: 96 minutes.