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By November 1960, just two X class locomotives remained in service when X 29 was withdrawn and quickly cut up for scrap shortly afterwards.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X 36, withdrawn in May 1961 after 741,609 miles (1,193,504 km) of service, is today preserved alongside dozens of other former VR locomotives and rolling stock at the ARHS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:
“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 preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
“I do seriously believe that if we can measure among the States the benefits resulting from the preservation of the Union, the rebellious States have the larger share. It destroyed an institution that was their destruction. It opened the way for a commercial life that, if they will only embrace it and face the light, means to them a development that shall rival the best attainments of the greatest of our States.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)