Re: 4 R's one train any way possible

[dbromage@fang.omni.com.au (David Bromage)]

Derick Wuen (cullend@webone.com.au) wrote:

> snip
> >Now that Vic is slowly loosing their gauge to standard, well then new and
> >improved ideas will have to be thought of as people will not travel on a
> >normal steam train to the one desternation each time.

> Has anyone investigated standard gauging the R class fleet?

Why "fleet"? I doubt the market would be able to support more than one on
sg. Even SRHC's B doesn't get all that much work on sg.

> I understood they were designed to be "easily" converted.

Easy for a government railway, maybe. Not so easy for volunteers.

> >Look how large the American Rail Network as grown.
> >Their excursion trains are well past twenty cars long and they have as many
> >loco's as they can find to put on the train.

The population of the USA is over 250 million.

> >We have to be special and create exciting railfan tours to attract people
> >for this may be the only way in the future that steam will survive,

The future of steam is NOT in the railfan market. If preservation
societies had to rely on railfans, there would probably only be one or two
operational steam locos in the entire state. Most of the money comes from
the general public, either on short day trips or charters.

The other source of income is putting steam on regular trains. V/Line
found this out by accident during the initial crew training excercise in
1991, and continued doing it as a source of revenue. If it didn't make
them any money, they wouldn't be doing it. This also makes money for
Steamrail and 707 Operations through the hiring of the locomotives. It's
going to be interesting to see the impact on WCR patronage once R711 is
running on a regular basis.

The general public are not going to be interested in the $300pp weekend
trip to Woop Woop via everywhere and back via somewhere else.

Cheers
David