Historic Photo of the Day: 2025-10-20

Today's historic photo of the day: T359 hauls a down VLine commuter train of wooden-bodied compartment cars at Footscray, Vic, January 5 1984. In the early 1980s, wooden carriages were still quite common on Victorian Railways, particularly on shorter distance commuter trains to places like Bacchus Marsh, Sunbury, Kyneton and Seymour. The carriage visible here in red livery is a W type carriage - a corridor car with compartments along one side. The W carriages were built by the Victorian Railways between 1911 and 1926 to run passenger trains between Melbourne and country Victoria. There were a few variants: first class, second class, composite and brake-only cars, plus there were short and long variants, as well as clerestory-roofed and elliptical roofed types. Judging by the window spacing on the car here, it seems to be an economy class 'long' car, and it has an elliptical rather than clerestory roof meaning it was likely from the later 1926-built batch. These cars were well beyond the end of their reasonable working lives at this time with even the newest of them being nearly 60 years old. Withdrawal of some regional train services, recent arrival of the new N sets and better carriage utilisation following the 1981 'New Deal for Country Passenger Services' meant that these cars could be withdrawn, and they ran for the last time in the mid 1980s. A handful of W cars survive on heritage railways around Victoria. Loco T359 was one of Victorian Railways' fleet of 95 EMD-engined T class diesel electric locomotives. Delivered in seven tranches between 1955 to 1968, these versatile 8 cylinder diesel Bo-Bo units cam in many variations of body shape, mechanical and electrical innards. T359 is a high-nose variant and was delivered in 1962 as one of the third tranche. She was withdrawn in 1989 and scrapped in 1992. This section of railway to the east of Footscray, 5.5km west of Melbourne, had been just 2-tracks until 1976 when it was quadrupled as we see it here. It has since been further amplified with the addition of two more tracks dedicated to VLine passenger trains making this now a 6-track section of line. Today's version of this train would be a VLocity diesel multiple unit railcar.