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Developing a Corporate History
Opting to write a history of a railway which does not exist, simply to provide an excuse for developing what would always be a very small model railway, probably sounds like a lot of effort. This is certainly true, but I have found it to be a very enjoyable part of the whole evolutionary process of the Brindabella Railway. It also does provide a very useful foundation for the look and feel for the railway, its architecture, rolling stock and traffic types. By taking this step, I have been able to create something which, although entirely fictional, is at least internally consistent and possibly even plausible, while at the same time giving me the opportunity to model things which interest me.This then is the fictional history of the Brindabella Railway.
By 1865, the railway age had started in Queensland, backed by expressions of interest from English investors. By 1866, the first Government line was running, and construction had started on extending the line up the Range to Toowoomba. June 1866 saw a financial crisis triggered by the bank in London which was funding the Government’s ambitious plans collapsing. At roughly the same time, some very rich tin deposits were discovered in the Stanthorpe area which left the Government in a real dilemma. It was very attracted to the promise of a lucrative traffic, but the financial crisis it was in, and its existing commitments left it in no position to exploit the find.
So it was that during this period, the Stanthorpe Mining and Railway Company was floated with it’s prospectus creating enormous excitement in England. Funds from keen investors, lured by the promise of quick riches, flooded in. Grand plans were launched for a smelter in Brisbane to be connected to the mine by a standard gauge railway, reflecting the wishes of the English investors and the English engineers brought in. No-one was then convinced that the Government’s experiment of being the world’s first railway to choose narrow gauge for its main lines would succeed, so standard gauge was the logical choice.
The colonial government of the day was delighted at the possibilities of new trade for the fledgling colony. The Stanthorpe Mining and Railway Company Act was passed in the legislature allowing construction after a lot of haggling over the route. Eventually powerful Warwick interests had the final say, so the line was built through Boonah and Cunningham’s Gap, rather than a more direct southerly route.
With the expected dividends from the mine, the railway was built to a generous standard. The first General Manager of the Company, a certain Brigadier Carpenter, told the Brisbane Courier he had told his backers: “I have no intention of presiding over a line built to penny-pinching standards. Build me a line we can all be proud of, and I will make you gentlemen very rich.” Alas, it was not to be quite as planned.
By 11 November 1869, the first trains were running. Coincidentally, it was at this time that the Company fell on hard times and its very future looked bleak. Even though the railway had just opened, concerns were expressed by local politicians that if the Company closed, the Government would be forced to take over the line. Not having the funds to run two railways built to different gauges, the Government was forced to build a line from Toowoomba to Warwick by hostile politicians, or face political defeat. By 1871 the Warwick to Toowoomba line was complete and Australia got its first taste of break of gauge, and to some extent the problems that would later be created.
Meanwhile, prospectors discovered many small finds and there was talk of a major find in the hills around Stanthorpe. The Company struggled on but the mine was not as rich or easy to work as expected. Investors in England expressed their outrage and called for the Board to be sacked, amidst suspicions that the original test assays had been doctored.
In 1872, the massive mineral find that everyone had been hoping for, but had remained elusive up until then, was announced in February, but unfortunately for Queensland interests it lay a few kilometres to the east of the border with NSW. While a new mining company was quickly floated to exploit the find, negotiations commenced with the Stanthorpe Mining and Railway Company for haulage rights. It was at this point that wily NSW politicians saw an opportunity to get in on the act. The new company was allowed to start its mining operation but NSW blocked any new railway connecting to the Stanthorpe Mining and Railway Company’s line.
This decision not surprisingly triggered a massive dispute between the colonial Governments - each recognised that neither could afford the expense of a new line but NSW was determined not to let the trade go across the border “to that upstart town sinking in the mangroves.” Eventually the governments agreed that a new private railway could be built, but only if the company was based in Sydney. This hard bargain was eventually accepted by a very bitter Queensland government, who at least still got the benefit of trade through Brisbane. The Cross-Border Railways Enabling Bill was passed by both governments at the end of the year - which ceded the rights to build railways “within 30 miles of the border between the colonies of New South Wales and Queensland” to a single new railway operator.
The Bills required that any changes to the Acts would have to be passed by both Governments to be valid - a clause which would later come back to haunt NSW. The Bills also required the company to be based in NSW for a period “of not less than 99 years”. A syndicate of private investors was established under the provisions of the Act for a new private railway in the area. The Manager of the syndicate, having lived on the cold plains of southern NSW near what would eventually become Canberra, called the new railway the Brindabella & Moreton Bay Railway Company. Negotiations commenced with the Stanthorpe Mining and Railway Company to buy outright their existing line. They eventually agreed, using the capital so raised to reorganise their own mining operations. On 15 December 1873 the new railway commenced operations.
Over the next decade, the Brindabella & Moreton Bay Railway Company settled into an existence of serving the mines in the area, and the increasing rural and passenger traffic between Stanthorpe, Warwick and the towns on the way to Brisbane. During this period, the Queensland government sought additional private involvement in railway building and passed the Railway Reserves Bill in 1877 and the Railway Companies Preliminary Bill in 1880 to offer land grants to prospective companies.
Within the next couple of years, there were moves for an inter-capital link. The Government could not and did not want to duplicate a line from Warwick to Stanthorpe so it encouraged the Brindabella & Moreton Bay Railway Company to build to the border and on to the NSW railhead at Tenterfield. In deference to the loss of revenue to the Government, no land grants were permitted for this extension.
In 1893 further negotiations commenced between the company, and the legislatures of NSW and Queensland. Queensland was still smarting from the loss of face to NSW over the company having to be based in Sydney but extracted a commitment from NSW to the arrangements, and for the Brindabella & Moreton Bay Railway Company to operate into NSW as far south as Tenterfield. For its part, NSW insisted on dropping any obvious Queensland reference in the company name so the Company became simply the Brindabella Railway, with the clause on corporate location being brought into the new Act so that the 99 year provision would not expire until 1992.
During the rest of the 1890s, Queensland was concerned about the continuing loss of trade across the border to NSW, especially grain and wool. Some grand schemes for routes which would have eventually linked Sydney with the Gulf of Carpentaria, and lines which would go all the way to South Australia were floated using the provisions of the Acts permitting land grant railways. While none of these schemes proceeded, the Brindabella Railway Company eyed with some interest the possibilities of using the land grants to its own advantage. Coincidentally, two events occur in quick succession: discovery of copper at Silver Spur near the border town of Texas, and a very large mineral find much further west at Milne Crossing near the Warrego River. This second find proved in fact to be two very large but separate deposits, about 60km apart and on each side of the Colonial border.
The Brindabella Railway ruthlessly pursued the provisions of its own acts to exploit the finds on both sides of the border, knowing full well that neither Government would be able to serve the fields, and also laid claim to significant land grants which were eventually provided. Queensland was at long last able to enjoy seeing valuable NSW ore being shipped through Brisbane and despite furious demands from Sydney politicians, refused to amend its Bill, enshrining the Brindabella Railway as the sole rail provider to the district.
By the time construction was completed, the Brindabella Railway had grown to over 1000 kilometres of main line serving most of southern Queensland and proving increasingly successful at tapping grain and wool from northern NSW. A number of lightly laid branch lines were built, mostly to serve grain interests. The only significant addition to its route in this period occurred in 1930 when an extension of the railway was made from near Boonah through Richmond Gap and on to Kyogle to create a second interstate link between Brisbane and Sydney. Unlike the first link at Tenterfield however, trains on this through route have always been run solely by NSW.
Only minor changes to this pattern would change over the next decades with most of the light grain branches being closed and a small spur built in the 1960s northwards towards Dirranbandi to exploit a major oil find. The oil contract was a major coup for the Railway, but was probably inevitable as the Railway’s existence made the alternative of a pipeline uneconomic for the oil company working the field.
A feature of the history of the Brindabella railway has been its very close economic links to the region it serves, triggered in part because of its extensive land grants. It has always been a major player in creating and supporting activity along the line, obviously with an eye to ensuring its own future. Another unique feature is that the Brindabella Railway has never willingly lost traffic to road, and does not see any traffic as being necessarily uneconomic. This came about through early recognition in the 1950s of the threat of road competition and realising that the best way to compete was to truly serve its customers with a reliable and efficient transport link. The management team at the time very early decided that it wanted to succeed in all types of freight, and then set out to achieve its goals.
The role of the work-force was pivotal in its success. During the 1950s, the Railway was struggling, weighed down by reduced mine output and poor crops. Faced with this, the local unions agreed that the best way to protect jobs was to create more traffic, and that if this meant breaking down barriers between individual trades then so be it. In exchange, employees were given a total of 25% of the shares in the Company, being one of the earliest examples of this approach in Australia. A number of studies during the 1950s suggested that the best way to reduce costs was to get the most out of the assets, so agreements were signed with shippers which provide a series of bonuses for on-time collection of freight and penalties for being late. This has resulted in Brindabella Railway being almost alone in resisting the trend to running very few big trains for its general freight services, which tend to be run at the convenience of engineers, rather than the people who pay the bills. Many of these activities and practices would later be confronted around the world as other railways grappled with similar problems, although most chose to take the simple response of giving up and withdrawing to a few key types of traffic. More recently, the railway has worked with a number of the larger local shippers to encourage them to use domestic containers where possible.
While the management of the Railway is very different from the State based railways, the NSW link created by having it based in Sydney does assert itself. For example, much of the rolling stock is based on NSW designs, and at times some batches have simply been add-ons to NSW orders. Similarly, although the Brindabella Railway was never constrained by a conservative “small engine” policy with its diesel fleet, the liveries have been very close to various NSW schemes.
Today, the Brindabella Railway continues to see heavy unit train traffic from the mines near Milne Crossing, and to a lesser extent from Texas and the sole surviving mine near Stanthorpe on the Granite Rock branch. The Dirranbandi oil field sees at least two trains a day to the refineries in Brisbane with the occasional spot shipment headed south; refined fuel products are railed back from Brisbane to a number of towns. Grain, livestock and cotton add a seasonal flavour to operations while fruit and meat are collected by locals from the area around the original terminus at Stanthorpe, including the Granite Rock branch. Most major stations on the line have their general freight needs served at least once a day, while a daily express freight operates the whole length of the line to Milne Crossing. Passenger service is limited to a three times a week service to Milne Crossing, although the passenger trains of Countrylink are seen on the line between Brisbane and Kyogle.
The busiest stretch of railway of course is where the Kyogle line joins at Jenkins Junction, just south of Boonah. Anyone standing track-side here will be treated to a constant procession of unit mineral and oil trains, grain, cotton, livestock and general freight plus National Rail trains heading between Sydney and Brisbane. While this is by far the busiest stretch of line, the future of the line between Stanthorpe and Tenterfield has been in doubt for some years with only the occasional train on the line, although during the fruit season it sees more activity as one and sometimes two daily fruit trains head south. More recently National Rail has expressed some interest in routing some of its trains this way to avoid congestion around Sydney.
So the Brindabella Railway has grown out of an inter-colonial dispute into a small but feisty railway actively involved in the area it serves. The future of the Brindabella Railway looks bright. Indeed, management has been eying with keen interest the possibilities created by the new open access policy and has started work on putting together tenders for operating services in other states. Don’t be surprised if a train proudly bearing the livery of Brindabella Railway blasts through a town near you sometime in the not too distant future!