Victorian Railways miscellaneous vehicles

The eight-horsepower gang motor, conveying five people, was built at Arden Street in late 1923.

The Motor car entered service in mid 1925 after being fitted with rail wheels in lieu of tyres.

In 1936 and 1937, six Dodge cars, built under licence by T.J. Richards & Sons in Adelaide, were fitted with rail wheels.

[1] In about 1991, it was realised that running long freight trains was no longer economical, given the shift to road transport that had been taking place for nearly 40 years.

As a proposed solution, it was decided to purchase a road-transferable locomotive, essentially a truck fitted with retractable rail wheels.

The truck was intended to haul short trains from three to perhaps fifteen wagons instead of deploying a large locomotive with far more power than necessary.

When there was enough grain or other commodity, the Melbourne-based truck was to drive by road to where the wagons were stored, and haul them to the nearest level crossing for loading.

In the early 1900s, the railways were beginning to invest in large infrastructure projects, which had been delayed considerably due to the 1890s depression.

During 1909 the shovel was constantly dismantled and moved to other locations, one example being Armadale, when the cutting was being constructed from South Yarra to Toorak during the quadruplication of the Caulfield line, to increase services to Frankston and Dandenong.

By the late 1920s both the Victorian and South Australian railways had built much larger, more modern locomotives than those intended to be tested by the 1896 dynagraph car.

Almost immediately, the Victorian system used the car to test the differences in rolling resistances between trains of four-wheeled wagons and the new bogie vehicles acquired in the late 1920s.

Some of this rolling stock – for example, the E open wagons – had cousins in the SAR system of a similar if not identical design.