Preservation
Efforts by railway enthusiasts to save the last remaining X class locomotive from being scrapped led to the establishment of a railway museum and the preservation of examples of many other VR locomotive classes.
By November 1960, just two X class locomotives remained in service when X 29 was withdrawn and quickly cut up for scrap shortly afterwards. Members of the Australian Railway Historical Society, aware that the X class was about to vanish just as the S class 4-6-2 had six years earlier, approached the Victorian Railway Commissioners suggesting that last remaining X class locomotive X 36 and an example of each of the various other classes still in existence be preserved in a railway museum. They received the support of the Commissioners, who provided locomotives, land, and tracks for the establishment of the museum, as well as the support of companies and individuals who donated time, labour, materials and finance to complete the project.
X 36, withdrawn in May 1961 after 741,609 miles (1,193,504 km) of service, is today preserved alongside dozens of other former VR locomotives and rolling stock at the ARHS North Williamstown Railway Museum.
In April 2006 the boiler from scrapped locomotive X 30, obtained by CSR Limited in 1959 to provide steam for Australia's first particle board factory in Oberon, New South Wales, was finally retired from service after 47 years service and allocated to a preservation group.
Read more about this topic: Victorian Railways X Class
Famous quotes containing the word preservation:
“If there is ANY THING which it is the duty of the WHOLE PEOPLE to never entrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and perpetuity, of their own liberties, and institutions.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“The reason why men enter into society, is the preservation of their property; and the end why they choose and authorize a legislative, is, that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society: to limit the power, and moderate the dominion, of every part and member of the society.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)