After our 1 April 2025 edition got quite a reaction on Facebook, it’s time to take a look at our actual April edition, which has a wonderful mix of historic and contemporary Victorian rail material.
Our cover photo this month by Daniel Sciberras headlines an eventful month for the Albury Line. It has seen works by Inland Rail that include demolition of the Benalla A signal box and Wangaratta’s Docker Street footbridge, and a series of fires caused by a southbound freight train that at one point threatened the historic Barnawartha Station building. Lastly, March saw the return to Albury of a VR R Class Hudson loco for the first time since 2008, and for the first time ever, it arrived there from Sydney on standard gauge track, rather than from Melbourne on the broad gauge.
Our Tourist and heritage rail column has a fascinating update from the Victorian Goldfields Railway team on the restoration of steam loco K160, which has reached another major milestone in its restoration. VGR’s mechanical engineer Mick Compagnoni takes us through the interesting process of how you reunite a locomotive with its wheels, and it’s by no means an easy or simple process! Mick’s words are accompanied by some amazing photos courtesy of Peter Lorenz.
Our feature article this month is by Ross Rowley, who worked as Area Stations Manager for the Western District of the VR and later V/Line network and was witness to near constant, far-reaching changes to the network. He also has a few interesting stories to tell about vice-regal and royal trains to the district, diesel loco horns been rendered inoperative by snow, a bomb scare for The Overland, and the Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983. The article is superbly illustrated with photographs from the author, Chris Wurr, Neville Gee, the Geelong and South Western Railway Heritage Society, and other collections.
Our occasional Rolling Stock column makes a return as Michael Menzies details a range of new locomotives (predominantly UGL C44 derivatives) expected to come onstream for several major operators in coming months, and the likely change this will bring in the use of older GM-EMD units such as the X Class and even G/81/BL Classes.
Our News column includes details on the new V/Line timetable that consigns locomotive-hauled Warrnambool trains to history, as well as the recent review of the Suburban Rail Loop business case by Infrastructure Australia, and more details of the new Town Hall Station.
And our usual other columns are there:
- Operations and sightings
- General works
- Tramways
- PTV service quality
- Where is it?




