Category Archives: Adelaide

National Railway Museum (Part 3 – Everything Else)

This is the concluding post of a three part exploration of the National Railway Museum located in suburban Port Adelaide. If you haven’t already visited the first two posts, I invite you to first visit Part 1 and Part 2. Part 1 looks at the narrow gauge steam locomotives that powered South Australia’s mid-north narrow gauge network, while Part 2 explores the history of the State’s broad gauge network. This third post is a bit of a catch all, covering a selection of the museum’s other rolling stock.

First up, a quick look at some of the South Australia’s private railways.

BHP Limited operated a short line between the company’s Iron Knob iron ore mine and the town of Whyalla. Rather than turn to British types like the government railways, BHP sourced two 4-6-0 steam locomotives from the US maker, Baldwin Locomotive Works, in 1914. BHP 4 has that classic US look, even though a cow catcher wasn’t fitted.

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Merry Christmas from the Photo Morsels blog

National Railway Museum (Part 2 – Broad Gauge)

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This is the second post of a three part exploration of the National Railway Museum located in suburban Port Adelaide.

Rather than repeat the introduction to the museum and South Australia’s railway systems, I invite you to visit Part 1 if you have not already done so. Part 1 looks at the narrow gauge steam locomotives that powered South Australia’s mid-north narrow gauge network.

In this post, attention will turn to South Australia’s 5 foot 3 inch broad gauge railways.

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National Railway Museum (Part 1 – Narrow Gauge)

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I’ve found myself going through a plane, train and ship spotting phase this year, and recently spent a day visiting two of the three transport related museums situated in the Port Adelaide area.

I should mention at this point that I don’t plan for Photo Morsels to morph into a machinery-spotter’s paradise to the exclusion of all else. I will revert to other subjects once I have worked off all this machinery spotting!

I’ve previously posted images from the South Australian Aviation Museum here. In this and some following posts, I’ll cover the second museum visited, the National Railway Museum.

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South Australian Aviation Museum

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South Australia’s annual Port Festival was held on the weekend of 19-20th October. The festival is held in suburban Port Adelaide, the location of South Australia’s primary commercial shipping facilities. There were activities of all sorts, providing both arty/cultural experiences and opportunities to explore the history of the Port Adelaide district (which dates back to the original settlement of Adelaide in 1836).

What caught my eye while reviewing the list of events was an offer of free entry to three separate museums that respectively record South Australia’s aviation, maritime and railway histories. Having immersed myself quite deeply in old sailing ships over the past few months (as you may have noticed from my September posts), I decided to pass on the maritime museum and give the aviation and railway museums a visit. In this post, I’ll cover the South Australian Aviation Museum and return in later posts to the railway museum.

Please note that I’m trying out WordPress’s multi-page post functionality for the first time and have spread this post over three pages to help with page loading speeds. You should find a list of page numbers at the bottom of each page below the Share and Like buttons. Use these to navigate to other pages. I’m not overly keen on how WordPress displays the page links so far below the main body of the post, but apparently it’s embedded pretty deeply in their programming. I’d be interested in hearing your comments about this and whether I should use this functionality again in future posts.

Overview of the museum’s main hanger. The combination of the Port Festival publicity and free entry drew a good crowd.

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Dutch Tall Ships in Australia (Under Sail)

Dutch Tall Ships (In the Twilight Zone)

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Welcome back to the third post of my tall ships series. After the open day at Port Adelaide finished, I ducked across the other side of the Port River hoping to get some good late afternoon/twilight shots of the moored ships.

If you have just arrived at this post, you may wish to first explore my two earlier tall ship posts:

The Initial Encounter
Port Adelaide Open Day

I’ve probably said enough about the ships in those earlier posts, so I’ll just dive into the photos. Presented broadly in chronological order, so you can follow the changing mood as the light started out as a golden sunset and then faded to blue.

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