Tracks To Nowhere
The Age
Tuesday February 2, 1993
Victoria's country rail network again faces drastic surgery, with more lines to be axed. CHRISTOPHER RICHARDS boards the nostalgia special to describe the way it was.
FLOWING skirts and full-sleeved blouses among the ferns of the Dandenongs or on the beach at Queenscliff. Boaters and ornate whiskers at the Lal Lal picnic races or traversing sun-dappled trestle bridges in the Otways.
And always, in the background, the steam locomotive.
Victoria's rail network from last century up to the 1950s was a chart of the veins and sinews of a healthy, growing state. It was more: an escape route from workplaces in cities or towns to the peace of farm or mountain or the exhilaration of the seaside.
The State Government's plan to offer nine sections of the remaining country rail passenger service to private enterprise is likely to see further surgery on routes that have been drastically curtailed over the years.
Tenders have been invited for replacing them by privately operated rail or bus. The Transport Minister, Mr Alan Brown, maintains that the overall service will not suffer. But it is not hard to see rail coming off a poor second in most regions.
Mr Brown, of course, is just another transport minister facing up to a sad reality of economics in Victoria's public transportation. Changing community fashions, and that mixed blessing the automobile, have been forcing rail closures for 60 years and more. In the 1930s, 14 passenger lines were withdrawn, with many more following in 1953 and 1954. Closures continued from 1986 to 1988.
Transport in Victoria may be faced by the blackest, widening financial hole, but opening an old almanac of railway timetables and maps to gaze on our once-intricate rail web can still bring a tear to the eye (or was that a speck of soot?). A grassed embankment across a paddock or a faded, unused bridge are often now the only evidence of the earlier proud era.
Some of the closures reflected worked-out gold and timber. But at the root of the decline are the car and changing community tastes for holidays. ``We live with the multi-car family now," says railway enthusiast and historian Mr Michael Guiney, a member of several rail buffs' groups including the Australian Railway Historical Society.
``And many more people are heading interstate or overseas on their holidays. Few try the watering holes of yesterday. No holidaymaker does it the way we did in the '30." Apart from the day-trips for workers in Melbourne, Geelong and Ballarat _ to Gembrook, Daylesford, Lal Lal, Bungaree and the rest _ older Victorians will remember the thrill of a longer holiday by rail to guesthouses in the healthy air at Warburton, to Cockatoo or (bus- assisted) to the railways' own chalet at Mount Buffalo (now long under private management).
The Railways Board was a leading force in Victoria's tourist industry and set up the early state tourist bureau, staffed initially by retired railway employees.
In the Otways, two rail lines could get you down within striking distance of the south-western ocean resorts, locomotives puffing south from terminuses near Colac through the towering forests.
My mother, Dorothy Hick, often contrary, walked beside one of the tracks, from Colac to Crowes, west of Lavers Hill, one summer holiday in the early years of World War II. She had taken the train from Melbourne to Colac.
Probably the by-then infrequent direct service to Beech Forest and beyond (only one train, on a Friday, from Spencer Street with a change to narrow gauge at Colac) discouraged her and her friends from booking the 18 shillings and five pence single second-class through fare.
Folk with more of a sense of occasion waved from carriages as she hiked. Hotels and guest houses that had arisen to cater for rail passengers gave a walker accommodation, too.
The litany of station names rang like the wheels on the trestle bridges carved from the eucalypts. Tulloh, Coram, Barongarook, Kawarren, Lovat, Gellibrand, Banool, Wimba, McDevitt, Dinmont, Ditchley and Beech Forest (the latter within hiking distance of Apollo Bay).
Then a swing westward to Lavers Hill (for a bus to Port Campbell or a visit to the glow-worms and tea rooms at Melba Gully) before finishing at Crowes. Nineteen stations in 22 kilometres, and only a handful now known to car-bound families where the road touches old forest settlements.
No one has been able to travel any part of that great rail journey since June 1962, when the 60-year-old Colac-Beech Forest line closed in the face of a declining timber trade and improving roads.
Passengers rode, figuratively, on the back of the giant timber, carted out on wooden tramways to the iron road. In spite of the importance of that industry in keeping the line alive, 13,355 outward passenger journeys were made in 1921 from Beech Forest on ``The Beechy".
Where couldn't you go by train in the 1920s? Heading off from Geelong through Marshall, Grovedale, Duneed, Moriac, Layard, Gherang and Wormbete to Wensleydale (near Bambra). Perfect for getting down to Aireys Inlet or Anglesea. And they hadn't even heard of the boogie- board.
There's no sign of a station now in Wensleydale Station Road; horses from a nearby equestrian holiday centre plod across the site. Further west, at least, drivers on a day trip up from the beach resorts can still glimpse the embankments _ even an old trestle bridge _ of the line from Birregurra to Deans Marsh (bus or car took you to Lorne), Pennyroyal, Barwon, Gerrangamate, Yaugher and Forrest. A line from Camperdown to Timboon was handy for Port Campbell and the Twelve Apostles.
The first section of the Beech Forest line to shut (the last bit to Crowes) went in 1954. The railway had branched off the Geelong- Warrnambool line, the whole stretch of which now stands ready to be replaced by a bus service, if no contractor can be found to maintain the permanent way and its rolling stock.
Victorians owe much to rail enthusiasts in Queenscliff (the Bellarine Peninsula Railway), the Dandenongs (Puffing Billy) and elsewhere for keeping wonderful services partially alive. They remind us of the exciting little nooks of Victoria that our parents and grandparents knew well, but we now speed past unheedingly.
You can no longer think of a nostalgic Gippsland rail journey to Welshpool or Port Albert.
The Kooweerup to Strzelecki railway opened in 1922 after a 40-year battle by mountain families. The authorities began closing it down eight years later, and the last train ran in 1959.
MICHAEL Guiney says that some lines, like the Saddle Line to Wensleydale, ``should never have been built". The reasons were ``political", a sweetener for rural voters. Other lines had a better reason to survive. The loco from Stawell to Grampians (a station west of Lake Lonsdale) chuffed its last in 1949, 44 years after going into service.
Tough luck, too, if a visitor now fancied a High Country rail journey to Mansfield or Bright, Beechworth, Yackandandah or Cudgewa (near Corryong). The Moe to Walhalla line suffered a lingering death between 1944 and 1954, although there is talk of restoring part of it.
To clickety-clack to Daylesford via the odoriferously named Musk Station is a thrill also denied today.
The `Spa Special' extended to Daylesford from Woodend in 1887. Our forbears seeking to take the mineral waters headed up-line from Spencer Street via Woodend, Trentham and Musk, then back down through Sailor's Falls, Kingston _ a grand village, still, with nearby evidence of rail cuttings _ Creswick and Ballarat.
Sure, you can get a coach from Woodend to Daylesford, as well as several other of the old excursion destinations. But is a bus trip really the same thing?
The timber industry grew branches off the Sale railway line to Neerim South and Mirboo North. Now the track from Traralgon to Sale and Bairnsdale is one of those Mr Brown has out to tender.
In Mr Guiney's boyhood, his family took the train from Melbourne to a holiday guesthouse at Healesville. His mother, as a girl, was taken each year to Cockatoo.
Out from Ballarat, people on holiday excursion fares flocked in their thousands to the New Year's Day picnic race meeting at Lal Lal. It closed in 1940. Spur lines took others to sporting grounds and another race course at Bungaree and, further west, to Burrumbeet Park (now Lake Goldsmith).
As the insidious car asserted its influence and more Victorians flew off to the Gold Coast, country rail became caught in a vicious circle of declining passenger numbers, which brought cuts in services, which forced still more people to look for alternatives.
Yet the still-crowded trains to and from Warrnambool, and even the packed VLine buses from Geelong to Apollo Bay along the Great Ocean Road each summer, suggest that not everyone prefers to use or has access to a car. It seems that the tourist potential of some of our railway lines is about to be finally given the death knoll just as outside tourists discover southern Australia.
It could even be a case of forgoing the Stony Point train for a bus to connect with the crossing to Phillip Island. For anyone left around for whom the train was an integral part of a Phillip Island holiday, that will really be sacrilege.
© 1993 The Age
