Squeek and Moss at the Valentine’s Day formal dinner

Squeekie looks over Adelaide from Montefiore Hill

A South Australian Railways Standard Gauge 4-10-2+2-10-4 Beyer-Garratt locomotive; an example of one of the finest designs of steam locomotive technology ever built

Moss with 18-inch gauge tank engine “Pug” at the Australian National Railway Museum in Adelaide

Day Twenty-six (Saturday, February 14, 2009)-- Happy Valentines Day! I had arranged for a dozen roses to be delivered to my Squeekie on this special day, and they arrived while we were at “brecky” (that’s Aussie for “breakfast”). Unfortunately, they lost the card that I had asked to be delivered with them, but nonetheless Squeek was pleased. Actually, she knew that they were coming because she had seen the entry when she was reviewing our bill earlier in the trip, but she was happy anyway. They were quite nice and dominated the view in our cabin, which has become our little home away form home—snug but nice.

Because this was an at sea day, we followed our usual routine during daytime. Squeek and I worked in the Crow’s Nest most of the day, and I took a break at noon to play trivia with my team, the “Orphans,” but we did no better today than we have on any other. We seem to fall into the middle of the trivia tenders, fortunately not total losers but not ever winners—although we came very close on one day, losing the tie-breaking question.

The main event of this day came in the evening, with ship-wide celebration of Valentine’s Day. Appropriately, it was a formal night. As I have noted before, this ship supports the “Grand Manner” of earlier times by holding formal nights when the passengers are asked to dress in formal wear, that is, evening gowns and tuxedos. It really is nice to see people all dressed up like that; it feels very elegant. We were dining tonight not in the main dining room, the La Fontaine, but rather in the Pinnacle Grill. This room was decorated for the occasion with glistening red streamers and heart-shaped helium-filled balloons. It was really quite cute. The Pinnacle Chef (whose name is Sean McKerrness) prepared a fancy menu of “love theme” items, that is, foods that are considered to be aphrodisiacs; I can’t speak to the love-inducing qualities of the selections, but they certainly were delicious!

After dinner, Squeekie (who was gorgeous in the pink gown she had worn for Leslee’s wedding) and I went to the Queen’s Lounge to dance the night away. I did my duty as best I could (dancing is NOT my strong point), and Squeekie also got to dance with Captain Olav, which made her happy. Overall, it was quite a nice Valentine’s Day!


Day Twenty-seven (Sunday, February 15, 2009)-- This morning we awoke as Rotterdam was tying up at Adelaide’s Outer Harbour. We were welcomed to the pier by the music of a “bush band” that sang folk music.

Adelaide, named for the wife of British King William IV, was founded in 1836, and is the capital of the state of South Australia. In 1841 silver was discovered in the region, leading to an economic boom for most of the nineteenth century. Lead mining continued during World War One, and later, following World War Two, Adelaide became a centre for shipbuilding and the Australian defense industry. Adelaide remains the home of 70% of Australia’s defense industry and much of the nation’s heavy machinery industry.

After breakfast—I really must STOP eating so much—Squeek and I went down to the Queen’s Lounge to await our tour. We had signed up for the “Adelaide Highlights” tour, our choice because we thought it would give us a good overview of an unfamiliar town. It so happens that the city of Adelaide is quite a distance from the harbour where we tied up, nearly a 45-minute drive, but our tour guide today (unlike the very disagreeable lady we had the other day in Melbourne) filled the drive time with a running narrative of local folklore. Like much of Australia, Adelaide is enduring a severe drought and has instituted water rationing. As a result grass, flowers, and even a few trees were brown or clearly dying, yet the flora of the region still offered a brave front. Here and there oleanders were blooming despite the drought; it seemed a lot like Southern California in the middle of July!

Unlike most other British-planned colonial cities, Adelaide was neatly surveyed by Colonel William Light, an engineer in the British Army. The city has a core of square blocks and evenly-laid out streets, more like how many mid-Western and Western American cities started life. The very central part of the city is exactly one-mile square, each side or terrace being labeled by its compass direction, and surrounding this central core are parklands. Today, being Sunday, meant that these parks were filled with cricket matches and families out for sport or a picnic. Even though the park grasses were more brown than green (except for the cricket grounds which appeared to be well maintained), it all seemed very lovely. Adelaide feels a great deal like California (except for the significantly smaller population), and I think that it would be very easy to live here. In addition, it is a university town, and so it enjoys cultural as well as sporting activities. Were I much younger, I think I could easily move here.

After our cruise of the streets and parks of Adelaide, we stopped at Montefiore Hill in the park on the north side of town, where we stopped beside the statue of William Light, the engineer who had surveyed the town back in 1836. From this spot there was a lovely overview of the city. Our next stop was at the South Australia Museum, but we really didn’t have enough time to view their collections of artifacts. Squeekie went off to investigate the aboriginal artifacts, while I went in search of their paleontology and local history stuff. They had a wonderful mounted skeleton of a Jurassic-era Allosaurus on display, and also a sea turtle from the Mesozoic era. I also spent some time in their bookstore, where I could have purchased much more than I did. I remain disappointed that I chose not to purchase a book of Aboriginal oral history, oh, well!

After too short a time at a very good museum, our tour guide collected us and took us into the shopping heart of Adelaide, and people were shopping even though it was only about 11:30 on Sunday morning. We were encouraged to visit Haigh’s Chocolate store, and we found their dark chocolate to be outstanding; this company has been in Adelaide since 1915. Then Squeek and I took a quick walk along the Rundel Mall, a pedestrian shopping zone, where we stumbled upon the Myer Department Store which is, we learned, very big in Australia. We also stopped in Borders—yes, they have them here—where I found a biography of Simon Myer, the founder of this important Aussie business.

While walking back along the mall to the tour bus, a local woman stopped Squeek and myself. She heard our accents (well, to her our English would sound accented!) and asked if we were from America. Although a bit apprehensive (because she appeared a bit rough and I was afraid she was going to try to hit us up for some money), we said yes, and then she said she just wanted to thank us for sending our firefighters to Australia to help battle the wildfires blazing in Victoria. I had read in the daily news sheet that California had sent 60 firefighters skilled in dealing with our brushfires to help out the Aussies in Victoria state. This warmth and friendliness was very nice and typical of what Squeek and I have encountered here in Australia; the Aussies for the most part are very approachable. Later on I got to thinking about the fires and firefighters, and came to the conclusion that it was only fair for California to send firefighters to Australia, because Australia had sent us her eucalyptus trees (which burn very easily, as any Southern Californian knows), and so we learned how to fight brush fires and it is appropriate to return this knowledge to Australia. They sent us their (burnable) trees, and we sent them our firefighters. . . .

A visit to the National Railway Museum-- After the tour had finished, and our bus had returned to the Rotterdam at the Outer Harbour, Squeekie went back aboard the ship but I took off to go to the National Railway Museum in Port Adelaide, about 3 miles from where the ship was docked. I learned about the railway museum in Adelaide during our trip, and decided that I would try to get there if that were possible. Fortunately, it is located in a facility in the town of Port Adelaide which was just about five miles from where Rotterdam was docked, on the main road into the city of Adelaide. On its route into downtown, the shuttle bus being operated between the ship and Adelaide for the benefit of our world cruisers ran near the museum. I arranged with the tour bus driver for him to drop me off at the museum, which was just two blocks off their regular route, and I would get a taxi back to the ship.

The National Railway Museum has an interesting story in its own right. Originally organized in 1963 by a group of rail enthusiasts interested in preserving a bit of the rail history of the state of South Australia, the museum began under the name of the “Port Dock Station Railway Museum.” In 1988 a federal grant enabled the museum to be moved to its present site in Port Adelaide, on land that was part of the original rail line built in South Australia. At this time the Museum’s name was changed to “National Railway Museum,” but I must tell you that this museum is not a federal institution. There are other railway museums in Australia, and none of them seem to exist on grants of state or federal money. In 1997 the privatization of the Australian National Railways led to a major gift of motive power, rolling stock, and other items from the original Aussie transcontinental railway (originally known as the Commonwealth Railway), including cars from the very first train to cross the Australian continent in 1917!

The collection of locomotives and rolling stock housed in this museum is impressive, although strongly weighted toward preserving the rail history of South Australia. The railway history in the state of South Australia is complex, reflecting in a microcosm the story of railways in Australia as a whole. The state-owned system, known as the South Australian Railways, ran trains on three different gauges. The system was begun on a broad-gauge (5-foot 3-inches), a gauge they shared with the neighbouring state of Victoria, but later some narrow gauge lines (I believe all 3-foot 6-inches) were built to remote areas to save money. When the new federal government of Australia began building a transcontinental railway not long before the First World War began, they decided to build it to “standard” gauge (4-foot 8.5-inches). Because the transcontinental line went through South Australia (and Adelaide), this introduced a third gauge in the state. It took until the 1980s for all of the broad gauge lines to be converted to standard gauge (although I understand that there are still some broad gauge lines left in Victoria). This complexity was replicated throughout Australia. Broad Gauge was used in South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania, and on some routes in New South Wales. Standard Gauge was used on some lines in New South Wales, and later by the Commonwealth Railways. Queensland and Western Australia used narrow gauge. Even today it has not all been standardized.

Some of the locomotives I saw on display dated back to the early days of the South Australian Railway, back in the 1860s and 1870s. Most of the locomotives were steam, of course, but there was one electric locomotive built in 1926 for an industrial line, and several diesels used by the Commonwealth Railway, including one used to open the extension to Darwin, with the flags still displayed on the nose; this latter diesel design was very similar to the famous Alco PA design used in the USA in the 1950s.

After touring one large shed chock full of cars and engines, I came to a door going outside, with a path going to an adjacent shed. Imagine my surprise (and pleasure) when I looked out the glass window on the door and saw there a beautifully restored example of what I believe to be one of the finest steam locomotive designs ever operated in the world. There, right in front of me, resplendent in the sunlight, was No. 409, a South Australian Railways standard gauge 4-10-2+2-10-4 Beyer-Garratt locomotive! Now I realize that most Americans will have no idea what the heck I am talking about, because no examples of this magnificent engine ever operated in North America, but that is just a sad reality of American railway history. We were too proud (some would say too arrogant) of our own steam locomotive designs and rarely utilized engines from foreign builders, at least, that is, after the first generation of locomotives imported from Great Britain at the start of American railway history in the 1830s. The Beyer-Garratt (the name is a combination of the principal manufacturer and the inventor of the original design) is a unique design intended to solve the greatest problem which faced builders of steam locomotives, that is, how to cram all of the machinery needed to power a locomotive into a space that will fit within the limitations of gauge and track support capability. By the end of the nineteenth century, as steam engine boilers were growing longer and larger in diameter, some American and European locomotive designers were building “Mallet” engines in which the rigid frame holding the driving wheels of the locomotive was cut into two parts, one of which remained rigid and the other of which could turn. This gave the engine greater flexibility to turn corners, but boiler size was still restricted by the need to set it atop the driving wheels. Garratt resolved this problem by widely separating the sets of driving wheels and their powering cylinders and slinging the boiler (and cab) in between them. In effect, the steam locomotive, instead of being a single rigid construction as was most common, or a clumsy, one-jointed device as in the Mallet, was made a dual-jointed, three-section machine capable of turning sharper corners and able to carry a larger, more powerful boiler, all supported upon wheel assemblies that spread the weight of the engine widely, enabling it to be used on lighter rail. The Beyer-Garratt design, in its most common form, became fuel tender + cab and boiler + water tender. If you have no idea what this means, look at the picture I have included with this blog entry.

The Beyer-Garratt was a British design, and so was most widely used on the railways found in British colonies during the days of empire. The first engine was used in Tasmania in 1912 (I think). That was a narrow gauge engine, but other Beyer-Garratts were built for a range of gauges from narrow to standard to broad. These unique designs were found in Australia, in India, and in Africa, the latter especially in Kenya, Tanganyika, the Rhodesias, and South Africa. South Africa’s famous NGG-16, a 2-foot 6-inch gauge design, and the East African Railways’ “double mountain” (4-10-2+2-10-4) design were both used until the very end of the twentieth century, and some have been preserved. The uniqueness of the design concept meant that a steam locomotive manufacturer (mainly Britain’s Beyer Peacock firm but some others also built copies) could pack a tremendous amount of horsepower into a footprint much smaller than would be needed for a traditional engine design. Americans used to encountering the mighty Mallet designs such as Southern Pacific’s 4-8-8-2 Cab Forwards used in the Sierras or Norfolk and Western’s gigantic Y-2s which pulled mile-long coal trains may be surprised to learn that Beyer-Garratts could have produced similar horsepower ratings while doing less damage to the track structure.

As must be apparent from this long lecture on a type of steam locomotive virtually unknown to the majority of American rail enthusiasts, I believe these to have been a special technology worthy of greater recognition (even by American rail fans). I have known about these mighty machines most of my life, and have seen pictures of them, but never before have I ever seen one “in the flesh.” Now, on this trip around the world, that has changed. First, a few days earlier at the Puffing Billy Preserved Railway near Melbourne, I saw a preserved and operational narrow gauge example of this locomotive (although I went by too quickly and did not see it in actual operation), and now, at Adelaide, I saw a standard gauge version, preserved although not in steam. Wow!!

There was much else of interest at this fine museum, including a tiny 18-inch gauge locomotive used to pull visitors around the property, but for me, at least, the standard gauge Beyer-Garratt was the best exhibit. Oh, how I would love to bring it home with me. Of course, I cannot, but I have lots of pictures by which to remember it.

When I returned to the ship, an Aussie barbeque was being held at the Lido Pool. I sampled some of the Aussie delights—the lamb was delicious, and I tasted an Aussie beer—and Squeekie and I listened to the folk music which was being played by the same bush band that had greeted our ship as we docked this morning. The group was named the Old Gum Tree-O, and was composed of two men and a woman. Squeek enjoyed their music so much that she bought their CD.

Rotterdam was scheduled to depart Adelaide at 11 PM, but we were tired from our long day and crashed earlier, and so missed the departure. Now we are facing three days at sea as we cross the “Great Australian Bight” and turn north around the southwestern corner of the Australian continent. I will try to use these at sea days to catch up on my blog writing.