Narrow gauge at Newport. Part 2

Friday Facts and Fotos Friday 1st September 2023

FFF 58

Narrow gauge at Newport. Part 2

In the two decades from 1900, Newport built 15 NA locomotives, carriages and vans, and 249 wagons. Almost 300 items of rolling stock in total. From when the first two locomotives arrived in 1898 in the next two years Newport workshops produced 35 items of rolling stock for the new Wangaratta to Whitfield narrow gauge line. These comprised of one passenger carriage, one combined passenger/brake van, 30 open wagons, one cattle van, one louvered van, and one insulated van. By 1920 there were 298 items of rolling stock to be used on the VR’s four narrow gauge lines, all built at Newport. All had trussed steel underframes, all were bogie vehicles with 21” wheels in fox-type bogies. Also, all were fitted with Westinghouse air brake equipment and centre buffer chopper couplers. However these were replaced by auto ‘knuckle’ couplers in the mid-1920s when increased train lengths and weight required double-heading NAs, and the arrival of the two Beyer Garratt locos in 1926. At first all narrow gauge rolling stock look alikes to the bigger broad gauge rolling stock carried the same number and letter codes. All was well until a fitter at Benalla ordered parts for a narrow gauge Q wagon and received parts for a broad gauge Q wagon! Very quickly that got sorted out by putting the letter N in front of the classification of every piece of narrow gauge rolling stock. That is all except the locomotives which never carried the N on the number plates, but were always referred to as NA’s in official correspondence. Rolling stock passenger and goods vehicles carried the first prefix ‘N’, and the next could be ‘A’ for first class, or ‘B’ for second class, or ‘C’ for a guards van. So a ‘NAB’ was a carriage with first and second-class compartments. A guards van was a ‘NC’, and a ‘NBC’ was a guards van with a second-class passenger compartment. Six ‘NC’s were built, and seven ‘NCB’s with combined van and passenger compartments. Initially, six saloon passenger carriages with end platforms were built between 1898 and 1904. From 1906 to 1915, 17 more carriages with compartments were built. These had five compartments with outward swinging doors and full-length footboards. They were mostly second class, but some had one compartment labelled for smokers, or one or two compartments for first class. As passenger traffic grew, in 1918 it was decided to convert a few open wagons to add to the passenger fleet. These were first known as excursion carriages and became the well-known ‘NBH’s numbered from 1 -5. In 1919 an additional nine ‘NBH’s with round-top roofs were built numbered 6 – 15. In the recent Puffing Billy era, another eight NBH’s (built by PBPS) have been added to the fleet with two available with wider doorways and loading facilities for disabled wheelchair passengers. PBPS has also built an additional five NQR goods wagons numbered 219 – 223. The huge majority of the goods wagons were open medium wagons classified as ‘NQR’s. There were 218 built, all steel construction, and with the exception of the first one they all had three-section hinged drop sides and fixed ends. The sides and ends could be removed to produce a flat wagon if needed for special loading such as a 2000-gallon water tank. In addition to the NQR’s, there were also 14 louvered vans classified NU’s’ built for perishable goods, one insulated van ‘NT’, four cattle wagons classified ‘NM’, and a single ‘NH’ which was a powder van special constructed for the carriage of explosives for the mines at Walhalla. Ed – These samples of narrow gauge rolling stock built at Newport are photos from the Victorian Railways ‘RS’ file now available from the PROV website.