The sun was out this morning so I went off to the main shopping centre about 2 km from home. Almost there I heard several screaming steam whistles and concluded a western suburbs-based steam preservation society was having another outing.
Indeed they were: in 1922, the first of a new class of locomotives, the K-class went into service starting with K100. The last of that class was decommissioned in 1979 and 21 of the units are owned by various preservation grooups.
The whistles belonged to a centenary special train of some 13 carriages hauled by three of the preserved K-class locos. It had stopped in my location, 57 km from its departure point to take on water for a round trip of some 325 km. The leading locomotive, marked as K100 (the first of the K-class) was actually the last constructed K-class, K153 (built in 1940) done up in K100 livery.
As I was preparing for bed some 12 hours later, I heard the whistles off in the distance again. The train had bee delayed by about 90 minutes at the far end.
I’ve attached a pic of the three locos.
