RE: Looking Back... Tasmain 1974: Part 5

[Mike Dix <mdix@mrt.tas.gov.au>]

Aus loco discussion mailing list

The TGR may have been able to achieve the same results but they were always
going to be the victim of political pressure to maintain bits and pieces of
uneconomic working - AN did not have this restriction being a non-Tasmanian
body and acted accordingly.

True, the 1990s were a time of despair as management tried to overcome the
restrictions placed on them by the economic rationalists and their constant
budget pruning. Did AN lose the drive and stop looking for business? Hardly,
but its very difficult to compete when the forestry companies, the major
traffic source, elbowed rail out of log traffic because they could squeeze
owner-drivers of log trucks to work for next to nothing. AN did gain the
paper traffic from Boyer in the mid-1990s and doubled their haul of export
cement traffic as traffic pluses.

Don't get me wrong, I am not pushing AN as the great railway manager, simply
I think AN gets a lot of unwarranted criticism because of what they did in
difficult circumstances. And before you place me in the AN-era, my interest
in trains goes back to the early 1960s!

ATN have succeeded to date because they had what neither the TGR or AN had -
a system which had no debt. Converting debt to equity was what Tasrail tried
to achieve in the early 1990s to improve their financial position but were
not successful.

Finally back to locos. ATN's headache is not how to replace the big EE's but
how to cope with the less than satisfactory `new' motive power which has
been dumped on them. 


Michael Dix


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